My fondest memories of the US Open qualifying rounds involve long, lazy days spent baking in the sun, walking all over the grounds, and consuming unseemly volumes of tennis until I had my fill. It felt like cheating the system: How was it possible to watch some of the best tennis players in the world, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, while pressed right up against the fence, for free? And yet it was so. All it took was getting through all the bridges and tunnels and then I could walk onto the grounds unimpeded. Some years it was more fun than the trip I made for the actual tournament. I told everyone I met who expressed even the faintest interest in watching the sport that qualies were the ideal gateway. It’s also hard to overstate how much more enjoyable the grounds of the USTA BJK NTC are when you subtract roughly 90 percent of the human beings. It can actually be enjoyed like a public space instead of artfully survived like a two-week-long crowd crush. With all the sudden marketing and monetization of what has now been branded as “Fan Week,” nearly all the former quiet pleasure of the qualies has faded away. I am not old enough to be complaining this much about how things used to be better, but the Open feels a little more frenetic and oversold and physically taxing every single year, and some of that has spilled out into the preceding week, too.

That said, this is the first year in a long time that I haven’t been able to attend qualies in person, and I must confess that the huge attendance has made for a vastly superior TV experience. These are, after all, matches with enormous stakes for players at this level, many of whom can use a main-draw payout at the Open to cover a good chunk of their season expenses. Even a first-round exit in the main draw wins you $100,000. These contests are high drama, so perhaps it’s only right that they’re now getting the atmosphere to match. There were lots of fun stories among this year’s qualifiers—I’m particularly happy to see Diego Schwartzman, the short king, make one last main-draw appearance in New York before he retires at the end of the season, and I’m curious to see if Nishesh Basavareddy will be the first great Indian-American singles player on the ATP even though he fell one round short. According to my friends on the ground, the talk of the men’s qualies was Joao Fonseca, the Brazilian phenom who appears periodically in our pages and who turned 18 on Wednesday. Fonseca has already accomplished a lot on his native clay courts in his brief career, including a win over then world No. 36 Arthur Fils a few months ago, but he’d hardly played hard court at the pro level until this summer. Like all the best in history, he progressed quickly, winning the third hard-court tournament he entered. That was Lexington Challenger, which he won earlier this month without dropping a set. That happens to be a title that Jannik Sinner also won at age 17, though Fonseca was exactly one day younger when he pulled it off.

Fonseca, who won the boys’ title at last year’s Open, took well to its hard courts in his first attempt to make the men’s tournament. He won his first two rounds of qualifying and in the final round on Thursday faced Eliot Spizzirri, who, despite his Connecticut origins, saw his crowd support overpowered by powerful chants of “Jo-ao Fon-seca” from the pro-Brazil contingent. The prodigious teenager and the recently graduated No. 1 player in college tennis were well-matched for each other. Fonseca’s ball-striking is outrageously pure. I know this, but I still trust a professional opinion, and it was validating to hear a heavy hitter like James Blake express his own sincere awe on the call anytime he smacked a nonchalant winner while backpedaling. He also seems to thrive under pressure. When Spizzirri served for the match at 5–3 in the second, Fonseca broke back—only to immediately fall down 0–40 on his next service game and have to defend four match points in the game. He survived that and took the second set in a tiebreak, before losing to a steadier Spizzirri in the decider. Arguably the most exciting figure in the men’s qualies didn’t even make it out. Perhaps he never will—it’s not crazy to think that Fonseca could directly qualify for the main draw next year, and for many more years to come. If so, it was a wonderful legacy to leave. Court 5 was alive, with fans packing into every seat, standing five deep behind the seats, and peering over the walls and railings from adjacent courts. If the qualies can no longer be peaceful, they better be this over-the-top passionate. Anything but overcrowded apathy!