Maybe, for Pete Sampras, this is simply how it has to be. Maybe this is the last best chance of finding the spark -- enduring tournament after tournament of relative underachievement, occasionally being beaten by players who at another moment in his career wouldn't have been fit to fill Sampras's water bottle.

	Pete Sampras hasn't been able to hold his head high lately after matches.

Maybe it takes exactly that much punishment, sometimes even embarrassment, to get Sampras to the boiling point.

Maybe that's the idea.

Sampras said the other day that he'll play through 2003 before deciding whether to retire, and what that suggests is that he remains at least theoretically willing to risk, between now and then, the diminishment of his own legacy for a few more shots at glory. The risk returns this week at the U.S. Open, where Sampras was a finalist as recently as 2001 and now, as a No. 17 seed, would be seen as a fantastic long shot for such a championship run.

The Open was the site of some of Sampras's greatest triumphs; now, you can almost feel people looking away, squinting with one eye to get a sideward glance at the man as he struggles to right himself and again become a going concern on the men's tour. His attempt to warm up for the championship, at the Waterhouse Cup in Commack, N.Y., fizzled in the second round with a defeat by 20-year-old Paul-Henri Mathieu of France. That brings to 33 the number of tournaments Sampras has entered consecutively without winning a title.

He said bluntly this week that "the days of dominating and being No. 1 are over," and as self-evident as that would appear to be, for a whole legion of people who watched tennis during the Sampras years it remains a tough pill to swallow.

Count Sampras among that group. At times people have colored him uninterested -- we said uninterested, not uninteresting, which is another discussion altogether -- but a truly listless Sampras simply would have taken his 13 Grand Slam titles and his millions of dollars and walked away. This Sampras is a more complicated tennis pro. He knows he isn't what he once was but appears to think he can rise up for one final run. What he's searching for is a way to connect points A and B -- a motivation as much as a way through.

"I'm a little discouraged," he said after losing to Mathieu, "but you've got to look at the big picture."

And so he plays on, right through the worst of it. He plays through a first-round loss at the French Open and a second-round dispatch at Wimbledon and the likes of elimination from the Waterhouse Cup on a Tuesday. He plays and he talks, and his words are the words of a man who thinks he can get his game back, even as his play is the play of a man who doesn't appear to know which road leads to it.

And he commands attention, of course, because ... well, because he's Pete Sampras. He is the great Sampras, and when he so much as clears his throat in a news conference people reflexively lean forward, wondering if this is the day he simply decides to pack it in and enjoy the fabulous rest of his life.

Instead, he speaks of amazing things. Unattainable things, maybe.

Championship things.

"My goal is to win another major," Sampras said. It's hard to know how many people believe he can. Harder to know, still, is whether Sampras, a realist at heart, believes it himself.

There exists a school of thought that Sampras' cruise through the 1990s somehow is working against him now -- that, essentially, Sampras had so little ongoing rivalry during his greatest years that he never fully developed the kind of killer competitiveness he might need to summon to get back near the top of his game.

It seems unfathomable, remembering Sampras at his peak. That Sampras was so complete as a player, so utterly focused, that it's difficult to construct a scenario under which a consistently worthy rival could emerge. Opponents were choked out with barely a whimper. What the men's game did, mostly, was wait for Sampras either to lose his edge or lose a step.

Now he appears to have done both, yet that's still Sampras out there, making his appearances on the tour, popping up at the majors and, lately, absorbing his beatings. That is Sampras out there, playing below his legend, taking his medicine, walking the unfamiliar walk of the early-exit loser in Grand Slam events and comparatively obscure tune-ups alike.

It is Sampras, and because it is Sampras it probably won't be over until he says it is. He returns to the U.S. Open not in triumph but in free-fall, and even then he cannot be fully discounted. It is Pete Sampras out there, searching for that boiling point. And here is the sticking point: You can't boil without fire.

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