The first question for Ingrid Neel — or at least the first one John McEnroe would have asked five years after she intrigued and even amazed him as a tennis-playing 12-year-old — would be whether she was still daring to be different.

Was she still determined to play it forward?

Her lightly freckled face broke into a bashful smile at the memory of her clash, so to speak, with Johnny Mac at his namesake tennis academy on Randalls Island. Never shy on court, Neel drew him in with a deft drop shot and lobbed off his return. She ripped her groundstrokes and — a shade short of 5 feet tall and 100 pounds — cheerfully rushed the net.

“Yes, as much as I always did, I think, and that’s going to continue for the rest of my tennis years,” she said. “That’s who I am, and that’s my best chance of winning. John really recognized that — that’s why it was a little scary to not take him up on the offer.”

In the early days of his start-up academy, McEnroe wanted Neel and her family to relocate to New York from Rochester, Minn., where she was dominating players her age and older. He hoped to mentor the girl who had watched videos of him from back in the day and had tried to mimic his unorthodox tactics.