Can we just leave things as they were in the picture above, with Jelena leading and serving for the match vs. Nathalie Dechy?  With an imperfect scoreline (0-6?), but looking like the Fair One's trip to New York was going to have an unexpectedly happy opening act that would produce a result that everyone, especially Jelena herself, could feel good about after two months with her game in mothballs.
   Unfortunately, reality doesn't allow such a flight of fancy... that 5-4 & serving 3rd set lead turned into a 5-7 deciding set defeat, a smashed racquet, and more hand-wringing about how to measure the good vs. the bad in Jelena's eighth straight loss.  50/50?  60/40?  40/60?  Or, if it were possible to climb inside the Fair One's head, maybe even a more worrisome ratio?


==NYJD Blue?==


What to think of the U.S. Open and Jelena's performance there? In many ways, I suppose an incomplete conclusion as to the latest current state of affairs depends on what you were looking for going in: desire, fight, peace of mind, a victorious set, a match win... possibly even a hint of something to sow the seeds of confidence as Jelena leaves New York? Absent any dissection-worthy postmatch comments, one can only glean some clues to Jelena's condition from the match's progression, statistics and the accounts of individuals who were there to witness Miss Dokic's re-emergence, such as JD.com's own Pierre Cantin. Pierre's account can be found HERE.
   Perhaps surprising everyone, Jelena got off to a good start against Dechy.  After being pushed in her match-opening service game, she held on then immediately broke Dechy to take a 2-0 lead.  Despite a  quick break of her own serve, as well as very poor first serve percentage numbers, Jelena managed to keep her game tight enough to grab the first set by a 6-3 score, finally snapping that nasty 13-set losing streak.
   But the second set was an indication that this wasn't going to be a quick snap-back to (old) form.  Jelena was broken early to go down 0-2, preceeding an all-too-familiar slide to a 0-6 set and seven straight games lost.
   Jelena starting holding her serve again in the deciding set, and the scores were making everyone perch on the edge of their seats.  3-3.  4-4... and then Jelena suddenly broke Dechy's serve for a 5-4 lead.  She was going to have a chance to serve for the match... but that was when the reality set in.
   According to Pierre, on the whole, Jelena outplayed Dechy.  She was certainly the more aggressive of the two, leading in winners by an advantage of 44-18.  But the book on Jelena for the last few years (with the original Great Mandula's Ghost episode being a prime early example) has been that if players just get the ball back on her side enough times, eventually, Jelena's penchant for unforced errors will do in the Fair One's chances.  In this match, Dechy's 21 UE's were dwarfed by Jelena's 56, which accounted for the lion's share of the Frenchwoman's 100 total points in the match.
   Pierre also noted that Jelena was getting on herself way too much, even when it wasn't warrented.  I'm sure everyone who's ever picked up a racquet knows the feeling... you play a few good points followed by one bad one, but it's the latter that you can't get out of your head.  You curse it (as well as the racquet, yourself or anything else that "distracted" you and caused such an atrocious moment) for breaking your momentum, rather than looking at it as an aberration.  Instead of forgetting it and picking up where you left off before the bad point, you spend the next ten (or more) minutes missing more shots and feeling the avalanche of anger and frustration just make things worse.
   There are different ways Jelena can approach such a situation:  forget the bad point and move on (that's what the best, most mentally-strong, players do), let the anger simmer and completely lose her concentration (like most of us), or vent her emotions at the moment and hope that that gets the frustration out of her system and allows her to refocus on the next point (as Pierre notes that Anastasia Myskina often does).  From the sounds of things, it seems like Jelena's reactions on Monday were often caught somewhere between those last two options... and that's not good.
   Serving at 5-4, Jelena quickly went down 0-30 and, right on cue, Pierre said she was visably upset with herself.  "Here I go again," must have been ringing in her head... as well as, likely, a few choice comments not suitable for family reading.  She served two aces in the game, but also a DF ("There I go again."), and the chance for victory was lost.
   Jelena still had a shot to take the match to a 3rd set tie-break (a year ago, she blew a 5-1 lead vs. Mary Pierce at the US Open before losing a 3rd set TB).  At 5-6, she was up 40-15 on her serve only to see her lead slip away and, then, the match end when Dechy's final shot dribble over the net and land on Jelena's court.  As quickly as she could even think to wonder what she has to do for something to go right, her racquet was bearing the brunt of her latest frustration.
   "There I go again."  And now what?


==The Long (not so) Hot Summer... is over==


   It's tempting to say it, "plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Certainly, such a come-from-ahead loss isn't unique for Jelena in 2004.  She lost to the likes of Maria Elena Camerin and others in similar fashion earlier this season.
   But it should be noted that the one picture of Jelena from the Dechy match on her bio page on the U.S. Open website was titled "Fighting Dokic."  The second set aside, that simple acknowledgement by whoever designated the photo in such a way is at least somewhat "encouraging."  There haven't been too many occasions for that adjective to be placed before Jelena's name in the last few months.
   The Fair One's losing streak is now at eight matches, but is this closer to a "good," or at least "better," loss than most of the others Jelena's suffered through of late?  It'll probably take a while to find out, and even after she makes her scheduled stops in Bali and Beijing later this month we might not have a clear indication what the good/bad ratio of the Dechy match is.  Hopefully, the ratio is a positive one from which Jelena can successfully begin to restore her lost confidence.
   If nothing else, Flushing Meadow proved what we already figured to be the case.  It's going to be a long, tough road back for the now #38-ranked Fair One.  Soon, her ranking will be at its lowest since she first broke into the Top 50 after upsetting Martina Hingis at Wimbledon in 1999.
   Daniela Hantuchova, also a former Top 5 player, earlier this season saw her ranking fall outside the Top 50.  She saw an upward spike in results on the grass in England, then fell off again on the hardcourts this summer.  Now, though, she's on a bit of a run at the Open.  On Wednesday, she upset #17 seed Alicia Molik, but only after narrowing surviving an 11-9 3rd set TB against lucky loser Camille Pin in the 1st Round.
   So, as Jelena has and will learn, nothing is going to come quickly or easily.  Even if she shines in the shadow of the Great Wall, she might stumble badly during the same indoor season where she managed to get her best results of the season a year ago.  As with her reactions to bad points during matches, she has to find a way to not let all her work be destroyed by one bad moment that quickly becomes another in a line of confidence-crippling ones.  Small steps of progress are fine, from New York to Zurich to, hopefully, Melbourne next January and beyond.  A victory over Dechy, especially after that love set, would have been a BIG step.  As it is, she'll have to settle for ending the 13-set streak, having a good chance to upset Dechy days after she made a Tier II final, and the knowledge that there IS indeed some "fighting" spirit trapped inside the Fair One struggling to get out.
   No matter how nervy she appeared as a teenager, recapturing that mental toughness in her 20's won't happen overnight, and certainly it wasn't going to return for good with one match following a two-month break.  It'll only come after finding a way to win a match like the one on Monday, then backing it up with another, then another... until one bad point during a well-played stretch doesn't immediately flip the "negative thinking" switch inside Jelena's head.  The House of Jelena can't be rebuilt in a day, a week or a month.
   Jelena still has two months to play with however she sees fit in the 2004 season.  The scary part is over -- she's come back to the court.  The result might not have been all she was hoping for, or even all that visably different on the surface from many others this season.  But she has to make sure that this Dechy loss IS different.  She has to make it the line of demarcation that officially puts this summer of discontent behind her... eventually, for good.  If we're to believe that what Pierre says he saw is the truth (and, of course, we do), namely that Jelena outplayed her opponent on Monday and lost because of her own mental errors and too-easy self-criticism, than that shouldn't be an impossible task.
   And that's more than has been able to be said for the Fair One for longer than most would like to admit.  So, maybe Jelena's 110 minutes in New York will end up serving their purpose... one of these days.

All for now.