It’s hard to play Rafael Nadal. It’s also hard to play Bjorn Borg at his peak, when the old warrior was making his myths with his wooden excalibur. Hard to play either of them, close to impossible to play them both at the same time, and yet that’s what Roger Federer was forced to do yesterday.

And in the end, it was too much for him.

It was Nadal’s day, or rather, Nadal’s night; an epic of shifting fortunes and alternating advantage, a match that came down, in the end, to a question of will. And Nadal was the stronger, if not by much. The champion who has everything was edged out by the challenger who did not know his place, who simply would not stop challenging.

Nadal was playing with the forces of youth and change and revolution to power him on. Borg, his ally, was admittedly doing little more than watching, but he was still playing with the forces of history and the unchangeable facts of the past. It was a devastating combination and Federer, as keenly aware of the pressure of his younger rival as he is of the weight of history, was almost torn in half.

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Nadal loves to put pressure on his opponent, with his miraculous movement and his ability to reach impossible balls time after time. He doesn’t just put them back in play, either: he hits deep, testing and accurate shots from impossible places. As for Borg, he won five Wimbledons on the trot and the thought of beating this record had eaten far too deep into Federer’s cool.

Federer had won five Wimbledons on the trot, and that’s why he stumbled at the sixth. His comeback from humiliation was as great a miracle as any he has achieved in his charmed tennis life, but it was Nadal’s day.

Half the people have been saying that Federer has been struggling all year and will struggle at Wimbledon; the other half have been saying Federer will find the old magic at Wimbledon because he’s one of the greatest players to step on Centre Court. Yesterday’s final proved beyond question that both sides were right, but the first half were righter.

It might have been a humiliation. He waited until he was two sets and love-40 down before he really got into the match, which might be seen as leaving it a little late. The problem with all players who have touched greatness is that they don’t accept reality very easily, not when that reality involves defeat. He did not go easily, and not without touching the miraculous. But in the end, he went.

Federer played poorly to begin with and looked ill at ease, less than the serene self we know. But, oddly, this does not inhibit him. He came back with a series of remarkable points to hold serve and then came the black clouds and the rain that might have been a part of Federer’s usual Wimbledon luck. He took a break, had a bit of a think and hoped the delay might put a tiny bit of a kink in Nadal’s rhythm. He came out a man renewed.

Federer had been uncharacteristically error-prone in the first session and Nadal had been eating his loose shots in a feeding frenzy, rattling up a two-sets-to-love lead. But after the rain, he staged one of the great Centre Court fightbacks. First one set was grappled back and then in the fourth, Nadal had two separate championship points. But in an uncannily brilliant passage of play, Nadal played superbly while Federer rose a notch higher.

Rare, rare times: when two great players both play their best at the same time. At this ineffable level of sport, it’s time to pack away the superlatives and just give thanks for bloody sport; for these daft games we watch that produce such extraordinary things and bring us such extraordinary people.