Roger Federer reached his limit, and discovered he could go beyond it

“In the fifth, I just knew I had to find my energy again,” Roger Federer said after his 7-5, 6-3, 1-6, 4-6, 6-3 win over friend and countryman Stan Wawrinka in the Australian Open semifinals on Thursday. “Play with intensity, play more aggressive, take the ball early, believe in myself. Serve good, try not to get in too many tough moments early on.”

That’s quite a to-do list. But Federer knows by now how tough fifth sets can be, especially late in Grand Slams. He came into this match with a 24-20 overall record in five-setters, but he had lost his last four in major semifinals—to Novak Djokovic at the U.S. Open in 2010 and 2011, Andy Murray at the Aussie Open in 2013 and Milos Raonic at Wimbledon last summer.

By the start of the fifth set against Wawrinka, it looked like Federer’s losing streak was destined to continue. Or at least it seemed to look that way to his wife, Mirka, who had her faced buried in her arms. Federer had led Wawrinka two sets to love, but the wheels had come off, and his leg had tightened up, in the third. Then, at the end of the fourth, Wawrinka had shaken off his own leg injury and discovered an entirely new shot, the chip forehand pass winner, to level at two sets each.

“It was an awkward match,” Federer said. “Always against Stan, it was never going to be easy. Especially how the third and fourth set went, I needed to react, really, because he has the upper hand from the baseline.”

As he watched Wawrinka’s confidence rise, and felt the weight of his shots increase, Federer began to get a sinking sense of déjà vu. His mind flashed back to other close defeats he had suffered late in majors, and he grew fatalistic. Thinking about his five-set win over Kei Nishikori four nights earlier only deepened his gloom.

“At some point you reach a limit, and you just can’t go beyond that,” Federer said. “You can play them tight. You can win one of them. You just can’t win back to back.

“…Midway through the fourth, when I realized my game was fading, Stan was having the upper hand on the baseline. I thought, ‘I guess that’s what I was always talking about. Things turn for the worse, you don’t know why.’”

So how did Federer make things turn for the better this time? He began by taking a page from his younger opponents’ playbooks: He asked for the trainer and eventually went off court for a medical timeout. This isn’t normally Federer’s style, but desperate times call for a desperate measure, and he had seen it work for Stan earlier.

“I only really did take the timeout because I thought, ‘He took one already, maybe I can take one for a change,’” he said. “…I think these injury timeouts, I think they’re more mental than anything else … For the first time, maybe, during a match you can actually talk to someone, even if it’s just a physio.”

Whatever the physio said or did for Federer, it took a while to kick in. Twice in the early going of the fifth set, Wawrinka looked poised to run away with the match. Serving at 1-1, Federer failed to move for a return, then plunked a backhand into the bottom of the net and found himself down break point. But he escaped when Wawrinka missed a makeable down-the-line backhand pass. Two games later, at 2-2, Federer against went down break point, and again Wawrinka couldn’t put his favorite shot into the court. He reached up high for a routine backhand and sent an unforced error into the net.

But just how unforced was that error? Federer, it seemed to me, had helped elicit it by deliberately hitting the ball higher than he normally would to Stan’s backhand. Wawrinka himself admitted that he wasn’t ready for the change of pace.

“I was a little bit surprised,” Wawrinka said of Federer’s shot choice. “I didn’t go back quickly enough when he came a little bit higher with his backhand. I was expecting him to be really aggressive on that shot and he completely changed.”

Federer, at 35, may not have the body he once did, but he still has the mind. We talk a lot about Federer the artist, Federer the athlete and Federer the denier of Father Time, but behind them all is Federer the tactician. He has the versatility to change things up from one shot to the next without completely changing his game plan.

A disappointed Wawrinka lost his next service game, and essentially the match. The new balls he was using skidded on him, he missed another routine backhand and he double-faulted at break point. To add insult to injury, the cheers for that double fault were deafening.

Since 2010, Federer has lost in the Australian Open semifinals five times; in each case it was someone from the Big Four who beat him. Wawrinka has insisted that, despite his three major titles, he doesn’t belong in that elite group. Maybe he has been a little too insistent, both to others and to himself. Stan came back from two sets down, and he fought through a leg injury, but he faltered at exactly the moment when he was about to take the lead from his old mentor for the first time. When you’re 0-13 against an opponent on hard courts, that barrier must feel just a little bit harder to break through.

“I think he gave me a cheap break in the fifth,” Federer said. “After that, I never looked back.”

From 3-2 on, Federer the gloomy thirtysomething doubter disappeared, and Federer the happy frontrunner took his place. Down the stretch, he served as well as he had all night, and the rest of his attacking game flowed from there. The curse of the Aussie Open semi is over; he’s into his first final in Melbourne since 2010.

At 4-2, 40-0, Federer even grew a little cocky. Presented with an easy backhand volley, he tried to finish the game with a flashy drop shot. The crowd, he must have felt, would have eaten it up. Instead, the ball caught the tape and fell backward, and his wife, Mirka, buried her head in her arms again. She had seen her husband’s flashy streak, and the trouble it could get him in, one too many times.

This time, though, it wouldn’t cost Federer. He had ticked off every box on his fifth-set to-do list: He had found his energy, played with intensity, played more aggressively, taken the ball early, believed in himself and served good.

He hadn’t avoided, as he hoped, those tough moments at the start of the fifth. But that must have made the victory even more satisfying. This time, Federer had reached his limit, and discovered he could go beyond it.