Roger Federer lost his semifinal match to Novak Djokovic yesterday 6-7, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2, 7-5. For Fedheads—and we are everywhere—it was a depressing, crushing collapse, not only because he blew a two-set lead but because, in the final and deciding set, he was serving for the match, at 5-3, 40-15. Somehow—a what-the-hell return, an unlucky net cord, a couple of brain-lock forehands, and finally a double-fault—he squandered that chance, and lost the game and the next three. The concurrent and ensuing flurry of harikari texts and e-mails among Federites reflected a level of transference that seemed unnatural even to those of us who are accustomed to investing heaps of emotional energy in this or that team. How could we possibly care so much?

It certainly isn’t because we love him. Many of us, I’d venture to say, hardly even like him. His obsession with fashion, his princely arrogance, his reluctance to admit fault or give his rivals their due, his tendency (increasing with age) to wilt at the end of his biggest matches: this is not the stuff of sports heroism. What gets us is his tennis. The way he moves on the court, the way he strikes the ball, his gentlemanly comportment, his interstitial tics: these are all peerlessly cool, and together bolster his claim, already strong in light of his results, to the meaningless sobriquet “greatest of all time.” I will refrain from applying adjectives or analogs from the arts/animal world, because many odists, including me, have heaped these on him over the years, and it can get a little embarrassing. (Last week, Clive Davis, the music mogul, was asked, in one of those roam-the-expensive-seats celebrity interviews, to compare Federer to a pop-music act he’d worked with, and Davis, bizarrely, conjured Billy Joel, which flabbergasted the McEnroe brothers, whose principal job it was that night to unfurl the superlatives. At least Clive didn’t say Air Supply.) The point is that to root for Federer is to root for a Platonic ideal. It is like rooting for truth. For a few years, he won so frequently and dependably, and with such panache, that it seemed possible that perfection could exist on a tennis court. He wasn’t merely a favorite tennis player; he was a manifestation of superhumanity, transcendence, purity. Detractors who said, “Don’t you get tired of him winning all the time?” were missing the point. Every victory was a validation. No one gets bored by the sun coming up in the morning.

His losses are a test. Is it that we’ve been wrong about how great he is? So unthinkable is this proposition that I will merely say, for now, no. Is it that, at thirty, he’s getting older—that his skills are waning? I don’t think that’s it. He may be a millisecond or two slower, but other parts of his game—his serve, for example, and his backhand—are better than they ever have been. He was playing brilliantly this last week, and he still seems to be in excellent condition. What’s happened is that two wonderful players (Djokovic, Nadal) have come along to challenge him. Nadal poses a physical challenge (his high lefty topspin forehand to Federer’s one-handed backhand) but also a mental one, in that he will never give up or go away. Until this year, Djokovic always gave up or went away, but he is stronger now, in both body and mind.

The problem may be Federer’s lingering air of entitlement. In his big-match losses these last couple of years, he has sometimes (that is, at crucial times) appeared bewildered by his opponents’ refusal to submit to him—by the intransigence of the universe. Yesterday, Djokovic, after dropping two tight sets, raised his level of play, and Federer sagged. Mechanically speaking, he stopped moving his feet, but really it was a mental slump, much like the one that afflicted him at the end of the match. We can only speculate, but it looked, as it often does, that Federer got a little sulky when his exhibition of excellence and his run of good fortune up to that point did not lead to surrender. During his post-match press conference, he expressed consternation over Djokovic’s go-for-broke forehand return, on double match point. In his view, Djokovic, having basically conceded the match, swung away and got lucky; it was a rebuke to Federer’s vision of proper tennis/physics/divine will. “I never played that way,” he said. “I believe in hard-work’s-gonna-pay-off kinda thing, because early on maybe I didn’t always work at my hardest. So for me, this is very hard to understand how can you play a shot like that on match point.”

The rest of us, believing in a genius’s-gonna-pay-off kinda thing, are finding all of this hard to understand, too.

Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images