This week, the best field in years descended on Washington’s Citi Open, and Zverev went through it like a toddler knocking down plastic bowling pins, wreaking destruction everywhere he stepped. Friday night, he needed 57 minutes to swat away Daniil Medvedev. Saturday night, it took him 63 minutes to bulldoze Kei Nishikori, a top-10 player in the world who was helpless against the towering German.

“Remarkable … outlandish,” Jim Courier gushed on the Tennis Channel as Zverev won 31 of 33 points on his first serve against one of the game’s best returners. “An overpowering performance,” Courier went on. “His bandwagon is, I’m sure, quickly filling up. My goodness that was impressive.”

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Sunday’s final against Kevin Anderson was as predictable as a sunrise — and lasted about as long. For the second day in a row, Zverev never faced a break point. For the second day in a row, he was done in just over an hour — this time a very nice 69 minutes. For the second day in a row, the 20-year old appeared to toy with a veteran. And you couldn’t watch that show without wondering, where exactly is this skinny phenom headed?

Tennis’s Big Four — Roger Federer, Nadal, Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic — still refuse to relax their grip on the sport, and the generation that followed never produced a worthy heir. Now we’re onto the generation after that — what the tour calls the Next Gen — and Zverev seems to be leaving his peers behind. (“We’re not even going to talk about the Next Gen finals … You’re lapping the field,” Justin Gimelstob told him this week.)

Zverev grinned Sunday evening when asked about competing against that group. Why would the No. 8 player in the world compare himself to other 19- and 20-year-olds when he now has wins over 15 of the 20 best players in the world? When he’s tied with Nadal with four tournament wins this season and behind only Federer? When he just became the youngest player to win four titles in a year since 2008?

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“I think I showed I can play with the big guys already,” he said. “I’m not an in-the-future kind of guy. I’m trying to be right now.”

And bless him for it, but it’s hard not to see him for the kid he still is. This is a player who only recently “put 25 pounds on my bones — and not only fat,” as he told the laughing D.C. crowd Sunday. His shirt seems to hang over his flat-screen frame. “There’s obviously a lot of physical work to be done,” he said. Just look back at some of the past descriptions in the foreign press: “gangling,” “scrawny,” “like an American surf dude.”

There’s a boyishness to his persona, too, even during this breakout summer. Among the many members of his team he thanked Sunday was doubles specialist Marcelo Melo, for losing to him frequently at FIFA video games. Then he thanked his mom for walking their dog while he’s on the court. “He can’t sit through two-hour matches,” Zverev explained, as if he would need that long.

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Zverev has long been coached by his father — “without you, nothing would be possible,” he told the elder Zverev on Sunday — but this season he also began working with former world No. 1 Juan Carlos Ferrero. Washington was their first tournament as a tandem, and while Ferrero gushed about Zverev’s serve and forehand and vicious backhand, those aren’t the areas he’s focused on.

“For being 20 years old, it’s something amazing,” Ferrero said of his pupil after Sunday’s win. “Of course I think he can achieve one of the first positions on the ATP Tour, but he needs to learn a little bit more about mental stuff, be a little bit more calm in tricky situations.”

Ferrero wants to see physical improvements, too, as you’d imagine. Zverev can be faster on the court, can fix his occasional awkward stumbles, can have greater endurance.

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“But mentally, from one to 10, I think he’s five,” Ferrero said. “So he can improve a lot.”

A five? Why so low?

“He’s 20 [years old],” Ferrero said. “He cannot be a 10.”

Top pros have been asked so frequently about Zverev that their answers start to run together; Anderson matter-of-factly noted Sunday that “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wins a few Grand Slams.” But the veterans almost always add the expected caveats: that he’s heading in the right direction but that doesn’t mean he’ll get there. That there are obstacles. That it requires focus and hard work and unfathomable dedication to convert all that potential into actual greatness.

Which is why this moment, before all those adult concerns get in the way, still seems so pure.

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“There’s so many expectations for so many of us. I think there’s so many expectations for Dominic [Thiem], so many for Nick Kyrgios. I’m not the only one,” Zverev said. “So I try not to read too much in the media, what they think I might become or who the top players think I might become. Because there have been so many young, great players who’ve never won a Grand Slam. So I’m just trying to work hard and to achieve those kind of goals.”

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He’s right about that, and Kyrgios is the perfect name to mention. Like Zverev, he oozes potential. Like Zverev, the tennis world has been waiting for him. But the 22-year old Australian seems on a slightly different path: He often looks miserable, keeps bowing out of events due to injuries, has about half of Zverev’s total wins this year and was booed off the Washington courts earlier in the week.

The D.C. fans cheered Zverev, though, and never louder than when he said Washington was probably his favorite city in the U.S. It’s the kind of thing a 20-year old, fresh off his first U.S. title and with a whole career in front of him, might say. And you wish he could just stay in that moment, when everything still seems possible.