The Serena Williams comeback is official. How will tennis receive it?

Tennis record books don’t contain decibel readings from big matches throughout the sport’s history.

If they did, there’s a good chance that Serena Williams’ final singles match at the 2022 U.S. Open would register at the top.

There was something different about the noise for Serena at that third-round scrap against Ajla Tomljanović on a late-summer Friday night in New York City. It was a rising wave of sound that settled into the bones instead of the ears. A roar that didn’t seem to crest and crash — because it didn’t. It would simply stop whenever Williams would step into position for the next point, dropping from 19 on a scale of one to 10 to near zero, as though she was conducting an orchestra with her racket rather than a baton.

Then she would make the noise rise again, with another cracking serve or lashing forehand. With scream of “Come on!” No one screams “Come on!” quite like Williams does. This was the sound of savoring something that seemingly no one wanted to end.

That’s how that last night in Arthur Ashe Stadium felt. It’s the biggest, brightest stadium in the sport. And it always felt a few clicks bigger and brighter when Williams was on the court, perhaps never more so than when the clock seemed to be ticking toward midnight on her epic career.

The sports world knows what an apparent end to Williams’ career looks and feels and sounds like. Now, it’s about to find out how a restart will look for the 44-year-old Grand Slam champion, who has been preparing for this moment for quite a while.

Williams reentered the anti-doping testing pool last fall. Six months later, she became eligible to play. Ever since, it has felt like a matter of when she would return, especially after she danced and dodged her way around questions from Savannah Guthrie on the “Today” show earlier this year.

The comeback will start slowly, with a doubles competition next week in the women’s tournament at Queen’s Club in London, one of the tuneups for Wimbledon. Does anyone actually believe it won’t pick up speed, with appearances at bigger events and in singles before long?

And when that happens, Williams will immediately feel like the main character in any competition she participates in, until she’s not in it anymore. Women’s tennis in 2026 has plenty of stars and all-time greats. It has crossover stars like Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka. Does it have anyone on the order of Serena Williams, whose presence takes over a venue the way Beyoncé’s or Taylor Swift’s does?

For so long, Williams had been so much more than a tennis player. Perhaps more than any other athlete, she forever changed the world’s perception and understanding of women — especially Black women — in sports. On that night in 2022 when she kind of, sort of said goodbye, she went kicking and screaming to the end, saving five match points, making every stroke count as the match passed the three-hour mark.

“I don’t give up,” Williams said after Tomljanović surged past her 7-5, 6-7, 6-1. “Definitely wasn’t giving up tonight.”

For a week, she had been the hottest ticket in New York. Hundreds of other matches unfolded over those first five days of competition. The only ones that seemed to matter were the three that Williams played — four, including a doubles match she played with her sister Venus between her second and third singles matches.

She’d been rusty all summer, after barely playing the previous year while managing knee tendinitis. Then she blitzed Montenegro’s Danka Konivić in the first round and beat Anett Kontaveit, the Estonian No. 2 seed in the second. That noise rattled Kontaveit, the memory of it searing her and sending her into tears when she tried to talk about it after. Tomljanović figured she had no shot.

“She’s Serena,” she said simply.

The glitterati were there for all of them, riding to Queens from Manhattan or the Hamptons, because those matches were the place to see and be seen. The tournament made the rare move of scheduling a first-round doubles match during the night session on Ashe.

Of course it did.

Williams transcended tennis as a dominant cultural figure. She became a wildly successful businesswoman and a mother — two endeavors that have only deepened in her time away from the sport, as her family and venture capital work have grown.

When people would describe Williams as perhaps the greatest female tennis player ever, she would say, “tennis player,” to suggest that she should be compared to Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Few argued with her. Those three certainly didn’t.

Djokovic has 24 Grand Slam singles titles, a record for the sport’s modern era, which began in 1969. Williams has 23, Nadal 22, and Federer 20. All are so much more than the numbers they created.

Williams had looked rusty through the summer of 2022, but over the course of four days and two primetime matches, it looked like the 40-year-old might just mount a magical, storybook run for a 24th major title. She delivered what everyone came for: Power, ferocity, precision, touch and a passion for the game that had characterized her career for a quarter of a century.

There’s a good chance that those qualities will still be there for this restart. Chances are, she wouldn’t come back if she didn’t feel like she could be some version of the player she has always been. She has spoken about her use of GLP-1 drugs — and her status as an ambassador for Ro, a telehealth company on whose board her husband, Alexis Ohanian, sits — and her feeling that joint stress caused by her weight had limited her pursuit of more titles in her late career.

Still, there is no history of impactful and sustained success for a player in their mid-40s at the top of the game. And since Williams’ first exit, women’s tennis has changed, with Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek and other champions of the era demanding even higher-intensity movement and the ability to turn defense into attack from the furthest corners of the court.

On that night four years ago, a few weeks before her 41st birthday, Williams could not maintain the rarefied level of play that has powered so many of her victories. She served for both of the first sets and had four set points in the second, only to let Tomljanović, who had never played on Ashe, climb out of 5-3 holes in the first and second sets.

Tomljanović matched Williams’ power and edged her in steeliness and accuracy in front of a crowd that was entirely behind Williams. That’s what in-form players can do. Great tennis almost never leaves a great player’s hands. It’s the ability to summon it under pressure and to perform at the highest level despite exhaustion that slips away, sometimes never to return.

Williams dominated her sport like no one else. She won 23 Grand Slam singles titles — the most recent, the Australian Open in 2017, when she was pregnant — and she won nearly $100 million in prize money.

She was, and still is a one-name brand who graces the covers of sports, fashion and news magazines. Just a few words from her so often immediately whip through the ether And maybe the frenzy that greeted her last U.S. Open run won’t quite return next week at Queen’s, when she’s just playing doubles. But a lot of it will.

And then, the way these things go, with the speed picking up and the stakes rising, if that is what happens, she will arrive at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in full, even if not on the singles court. Williams never did anything small. She never passed under the radar. If one thing is for sure, she certainly isn’t going to start now.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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