Which is why the most indelible televised image from the Wimbledon championships just completed Sunday, for me, is the lasting sight of perhaps the sport’s most graceful player ever doing something profoundly uncommon.

On a key point, in a huge match, Roger Federer fell to earth.

AD

Make no mistake: It wasn’t just that the winningest male Slam champion ever hit the deck, toppling to the grass as his footing gave way, just months after his left knee (torn meniscus) was surgically repaired. And it wasn’t simply that Federer fell en route to ultimately falling to Milos Raonic, the towering 25-year-old Canadian and eventual runner-up, in five sets.

AD

What gave the image deeper meaning was how Federer himself described that moment in talking with the media after the semifinal match Friday.

“I don’t slip a lot. I don’t ever fall down. It was a different fall for me than I’ve ever had.”

That demands a pause to fully absorb. Federer, who turns 35 next month, had never taken a spill like that — and so he didn’t know quite what to make of it.

AD

Added Fed: “With the body that’s been, you know, playing up this year, I just hope I’m going to be fine.”

And right there, of course, the Swiss champion wasn’t just citing how he lost to Raonic. He was also hinting at what it feels like when you are losing even a bit of athletic traction to Time.

Just minutes earlier, Federer essentially surrendered the fourth set when he hit consecutive double-faults — something else that he never does. “Something went wrong,” Federer said, adding: “Unexplainable for me really, yeah.”

AD

But it is all too explainable. Federer was dominant from 2003 to 2009, and during the second half of his touring career, he has largely managed to stave off Father Time, even avoiding major injury till this season (when he hurt his knee while doing a simple fatherly chore himself). Still, through the Open era, men rarely compete seriously for Slam titles much past age 35.

AD

What Federer is feeling is that stage of a competitive profession when you ask your body to do what it has routinely done for you throughout a Hall of Fame career, and then — as aging causes the gears to mesh not quite cleanly sometimes — one day the body’s inner workings can’t answer the call. Inevitably, that one day will turn into days, and then a fortnight.

And so this Wimbledon image could turn out to be Federer’s sharpest realization yet: that when a tennis god falls violently enough to earth, jogged loose is the awareness that the highest athletic heavens won’t be one’s primary residence so much longer. Even as such former tennis gods as Bjorn Borg and Ivan Lendl and commentator John McEnroe bore knowing witness on the Wimbledon sidelines.

In 2006, in writing a classic essay on Federer for the New York Times’ Play magazine, David Foster Wallace lobbed up a sentence that is patently false (a verbal lob that he had to know was indefensible to the easy smash, yet perhaps he loved the mere sense of pure rhetorical provocation).

AD

AD

Wallace wrote: “Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body.” Men’s sports could only be “loved,” he contended, when cast within the symbology of war.

Of course, any sportswriter who has spent any true length of time in a press box knows that such fixation on beauty and grace has long drawn the viewer’s gaze and the writer’s focus — isolated movement so dazzling that it’s lifted clean from militaristic lingo and context. Within the late Wallace’s own lifetime, in fact, such supreme male athletes as Lance “Bambi” Alworth and Lynn Swann and Julius Erving and Wayne Gretzky and Roberto Clemente and Ken Griffey Jr. — to cite just a quick half-dozen — inspired glowing focuses on their liquid lines of movement and, in some cases, balletic maneuvers. Their beauty and grace have been talked about ad nauseam, for good and great reason.

But thanks to Wallace and other early lyrical fans, Federer’s gifts were appreciated within that same rarefied air. And so, for so many years now, we have often appreciated Federer’s elevated physical gifts as a constant — even as rivals like Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray (Sunday’s men’s champion) rose their games.

AD

AD

Indeed, as L. Jon Wertheim wrote in his 2009 book, “Strokes of Genius,” “The descriptions of Federer’s game are invariably pulled from art and light. It’s poetry, ballet, a Renaissance painter, a symphony. He’s an artist, a calligrapher, a maestro, a virtuoso playing a stringed instrument. He’s luminescent, phosphorescent, incandescent.”

And indeed, my colleague Sarah Kaufman, The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic, devotes much of a chapter to Federer in her 2015 book, “The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life.” In recounting Murray’s 2012 loss in the Wimbledon final, for instance, Kaufman writes of Federer’s “flowing game, undulating and continuous,” and of his “bouncing spongily … gravity touching him as lightly as the laws of nature.”

All of which points to why a lone image lingers when Federer describes a Centre Court fall that, for most of the rest of us, would simply be the familiar feeling of our bodies obeying the laws of nature.

AD

AD

Federer’s words, in fact, were strikingly similar to those of another sublime but relatively aging athlete offered on that very same day.

“Right now, I’m just in shock,” said two-time Olympic medalist Dawn Harper-Nelson on Friday, after failing to even make the finals for the 100-meter hurdles at the U.S. Olympic track and field finals in Oregon.

Added the 32-year-old hurdler: “It was weird. I was watching myself, like: ‘Come on! What are you doing? Come on!’ … I’ve never been in a position where someone is pulling away and I wasn’t able to react. I was saying to myself, ‘What, you can’t go?’ ”

“Never been.” She had, in other words, hit the same, strangely unfamiliar place as Federer. You make a superior career out of your mind-body connection. And then, more and more, your body does less and less of what your mind has come to expect it to.

AD

AD

For so many years, even as his ranking slipped a bit, Federer has been able to draw upon his gifts ethereal.

Now, with this Wimbledon, I felt compelled to sketch a Federer misstep more than just physical.

If only in a tennis god’s single spill and resulting utter confusion, Federer — for a moment — became eminently relatable. The line of a professional life — like a meat-and-potatoes groundstroke — has an arc.