Rain is ... ? Revisiting the last time that wet weather went viral in women's tennis

WATCH: Liudmila Samsonova ran out of steam in her first WTA 1000 final after playing her semifinal against Elena Rybakina hours prior on Sunday.

A soggy end to the Omnium Banque Nationale in Montreal, and a similar start to the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati, had players and fans alike feeling blue on Monday's first day of play.

After rain delays and washouts were two of the other major players at the business end of last week's WTA 1000 event in Montreal, where Jessica Pegula beat Liudmila Samsonova on Sunday after the latter twice played two matches in one day over the weekend, the wet weather followed the tour south to Mason, Ohio. Play on the tournament's opening day started two hours later than expected due to, you guessed it, more wet weather.

Daria Kasatkina, who was the beaten party last week in a marathon quarterfinal match against Elena Rybakina that ended at 2:55 a.m. Friday, took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to inject some levity into the situation.

While Kasatkina got a variety of responses, with fans citing indoor events like Stuttgart and Linz, to the entire Australian summer, veterans of the tennis-watching internet might recall that 2023 wasn't the first year that Canada's signature tournament was plagued by near-constant rain. In 2011, the WTA posted this now-iconic video to YouTube, where players including Ana Ivanovic, Caroline Wozniacki, Petra Kvitova, Gisela Dulko and Flavia Pennetta (plus other special guests!) gave their lighthearted view of rainy days in Toronto.

But in the present, Rybakina was perhaps the player most affected by Montreal's starts and stops. Her second-round match against Jennifer Brady was interrupted in a first-set tiebreak, and she finished off a three-set comeback the next day; four three-setters, coupled with a nearly eight-hour rain delay, led to her and Kasatkina taking the court after 11 p.m. on Friday; and her semifinal against Samsonova, scheduled for Saturday evening, was washed out to Sunday afternoon.

Once her stay in Montreal concluded, the 2022 Wimbledon champion took a strong stance on the situation.

After losing to Samsonova in three sets, Rybakina told reporters that she hoped it was "the first time and ... the last time" that she'd be forced to put in such a superhuman effort. Other players, including Pegula and world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, were among those to chime in in response to the events that transpired.

"It's the first time and hopefully the last time because I think it's been a little bit unprofessional from the -- I cannot say really the tournament because I think that the most important is the WTA here," Rybakina said. "Leadership a little bit weak for now, but hopefully something is going to change because this year it was many situations which I cannot really understand.

"Definitely I feel destroyed just because of the scheduling and the whole situation. I'm not really happy about it, but yeah, it is what it is. Unfortunately, players cannot do much in these situations. The decision is not really ours."