For many fans, tennis withdrawal begins just after the U.S. Open concludes. But then there are some like yours truly who waited out the last flickering lights of the last Davis Cup match before those pangs truly begin. Winter is coming. The cold is already here in the Northeast. I’m lucky to sneak in an hour or two of indoor court time to s lake the old tennis thirst in me, but the tour has shut up shop.

The old guard of the men’s tour once again split the biggest prizes in the game among themselves. Including the 2004 season, 60 Grand Slam tournaments have been played. Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic have won 50 of those. You read that right: 50. For two seasons running, all of the Grand Slams have been won by these three players.

When Roger Federer won the first Grand Slam of 2018, the Australian Open, and Rafa Nadal won the second, the French Open, it seemed to me like we were well on our way to seeing more of Federer and Nadal dominate. In 2017, Djokovic had mysteriously fallen apart, and the first half of this year bore all the signs of a continuation of his wane. I missed him. The ruthless, millimetric precision of his game is something you appreciate most after it has been gone for a while.

It wasn’t gone for long. For most of the second half of 2018, the stage lights fixed themselves back on the 31-year-old Serb. Djokovic seemed not only unbeatable but practically unplayable. He won his fourth Wimbledon title; he followed up by winning the prestigious warm-up to the U.S. Open in Cincinnati, the U.S. Open after that and then one of the biggest prizes of the fall, the Shanghai Masters, where he audaciously lost neither a set nor a service game.

The year had one more twist: youth. Brave, resilient youth. In the finals of big tournaments, no less. I was excited to catch a glimpse of it.