Rafael Nadal may not be finished, but he's getting close

Once you prove yourself to be a member of a sport's pantheon, we race to be the first one to correctly call you done, finished, kaput. Just ask Roger Federer. It becomes a game. OK ... NOW he's done. No? Now! And ...... now!

Ten years from now, when tennis' aging Big 4 are finally finished (well, except for Djokovic, who will be sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber and still winning five-hour matches), we'll be able to go back and properly pinpoint the moment everything officially fell apart for each given player. And perhaps Wednesday was just that for Nadal. Perhaps he'll never again maintain for two weeks what we have thought of as his fifth gear of play. He's 29, after all, and his absurdly physical style has put four decades' worth of age on his legs. Watching him play makes you tired, and he probably wasn't a candidate to play elite, top-3 or so tennis for quite as long as the lighter-on-his-feet Federer has. From a style standpoint, he is Dwyane Wade to Federer's Kobe Bryant, Bo Jackson to Fed's Barry Sanders.

But he's still 70-2 all time at Roland Garros. It took Novak Djokovic to end his five-year title streak. He dropped three sets during his 2011 title run and was taken to five sets by John Isner, and we started to assume Djokovic was going to overtake him soon; then he dropped one set in winning in 2012. He dropped four sets and won as a 3-seed in 2013, then dropped only two as a 1-seed in 2014. Every time we think he's on his way down, he rebounds. Djokovic's Wednesday dominance was extreme, but it was only a little bit more convincing than Nadal's other Roland Garros loss, a 6-2, 6-7, 6-4, 7-6 defeat at the hands of Robin Soderling. He responded to that one by winning five titles in a row.

Nadal might not be done, and he still might have a 10th title in him if Djokovic's form dips again (and your perfect form always does). But when he is officially through winning slams, this is what it will look like: a timid, aging Nadal, camped out far behind the baseline and incapable of doing enough damage against an opponents who is dialed in and running him from side to side. That it happened against a peaking Djokovic doesn't mean it will happen against just anybody, but it will likely happen more in the next couple of years.