Serena Williams says she wants to go through the 2003 women's tennis season undefeated. There are precisely two appropriate responses to this news:

	Serena Williams hasn't shied away from anything on the court, let alone her desire to win every match this season.

1.) Not gonna happen; and

2.) Can't wait to see it.

It's got nothing to do with logic and everything to do with heart, and for that alone Serena Williams ought to be applauded from the rafters. And as the Australian Open prepares to officially drop the flag on this race toward brilliance, the right-thinking tennis fiend finds himself rooting her on with both fists.

Is there a downside here?

In a sports biosphere that continually checks its standing in the 18-to-34 buyer's demographic at DKNY, it's refreshing to hear an athlete willing to bet on her talent. Williams is doing that. She's the right player at the right time to consider the possibility of relative perfection, and she is bold enough to share the thought.

And instead of ridicule, never in short supply anytime an athlete steps up to express her far-flung desires in a sport, let's go with undiluted admiration straight down the line.

The smart money says Williams can't possibly go through a tennis season unbeaten. The passionate money says, let's everybody watch.

You already know the odds on something like what Williams wants to accomplish: they stink. The Australian alone is a vivid reminder of that. It was in Sydney, in a match against Meghann Shaughnessy, that Serena sprained an ankle going for a drop shot, which caused her to miss the Aussie Open in 2002. Had she played and won it, she would have been on her way to a sweep of the Grand Slams.

It's exactly that kind of freak twist that makes perfection so elusive, of course. Everybody in tennis exists one wrong foot-plant away from an injury default. Most players are a lousy set away from an early exit in any given tournament.

Williams, it must be said, isn't most players. She isn't even her sister Venus, whom she clearly surpassed as a tennis player during the 2002 season. No, Serena now sets the bar high because, based upon everything we've seen, she can.

Going through the '02 season with just six match defeats -- and winning the final three Slam titles -- will do that for a person. But it's more than that. It is Serena's very well-founded sense that she is still on the ascendant part of the arc.

The scary truth is, Williams can get better. It doesn't necessarily translate to more victories, but she can get better. It's almost as if 2002 awakened Serena to the possibilities of her talent -- and it is an awesome thing to confront, a talent like that.

Before Tiger Woods became Tiger Woods, he essentially had to come to grips with how good he could be. It is a fundamental step for any athlete who is aiming to become elite. What Woods still struggles with, what anyone would struggle with, is the almost otherworldly sense of importance attached to everything else he does -- but as for golf, the man knows in specific detail what he's capable of. That is a basic act of accepting responsibility for one's talent, and it ain't easy.

Marion Jones did it, which is one reason she is idolized by so many fellow athletes. Jones had the brass tacks to say she wanted to hunt down five gold medals at the Sydney Olympics in the late summer of 2000. She had come to terms with her potential, and she wasn't afraid to declare what was really going through her mind.

Ultimately, Jones was knocked for not winning five golds at Sydney, for winning "only" three. The short-term memory of the sporting world duly marked that down as a failure and went happily along to the next topic.

But in 20 years, no one will remember what Marion Jones said; they'll remember what she did. What Jones did in Sydney was to become the first woman to win five Olympic medals in one Games, three of them gold. If she didn't achieve never-before-seen greatness, it was only because she raised that bar so high in the first place.

Now it is Serena Williams' turn up high, and maybe the most impressive thing of all is the part about her not being afraid to say out loud that she wants perfection. She'll go for it in 2003, and logic says the pursuit could be over less than a week from now. Good thing logic almost never suits up.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com