PARIS — It was going to end in tears, wasn’t it?
Yet it ended rather well for Andy Murray in Paris even without a final medal to cap his lengthy and shiny career.
He got to hear the roars, got to feel the goose bumps that only a genuine tournament can generate, got to show the guile and grit that took him from modest and unlikely beginnings to three major singles titles, two Olympic gold medals, a Davis Cup victory and 41 weeks at world No. 1.
“Sometimes you still have to pinch yourself that it all happened as it did,” Murray’s mother Judy once told me. “You start off playing sponge ball tennis in the hall, and you come from a very small town in Scotland, where tennis is 17th in participation in terms of the sports that are played.
“It is amazing, truly. But what it shows you is that anything is possible. The talent has to be there, of course. It’s all over the world, but it’s not everybody who was able to develop the talent.”