NEW YORK -- As the noisy crescendo continues to rise from the supposed death knell for tennis, isn't it ironic that the windows to its purpose and core remain more exposed and accessible than any other sport?

	Andre Agassi is now 3-6 against Pete Sampras in Slams.

When Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi battled Father Time, Mother Nature and each other across the net in another classic U.S. Open championship Sunday, we all resumed confirming our intimate knowledge of everything that these two athletes were, are and perhaps ever will be: their personalities, triumphs, travails, romances, clothes preferences and the very hair (or male pattern lack thereof) on their venerable heads. That familiarity, even more than their longevity and contrasting styles -- if anybody had forgotten the images of the bony, coltish prepster whipping the cheesy Vegas rat-tail when they were what, 12?, in their first Open final, CBS would show them approximately 472 times -- made their competition supremely special. Not to mention, their rivalry the best in all of sport.

Sampras-Agassi XXXIV -- despite The Pistol swamping Double A early and then outlasting him over nearly three hours to win 6-3, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4 -- simply screamed the question: Where have all those gone? Not rat-tails, rivalries.

The tennis sisters? Cue the Beatles. All you -- and obviously the Williams -- need is love. Golf? Nothing but Tiger vs. Par. Or, if you're really hard up, Hootie Johnson vs. Half The Human Race.

As for individual players in team sports, the f-bombs -- fickle loyalties, free agency and frequent steroids -- have rendered memorable mano-a-manos few and far between. In baseball, Bonds-Schilling? Martinez-Rodriguez? Are you kidding? The most compelling pitcher-hitter confrontation of recent vintage ended with Roger Clemens flinging a piece of broken wood at Mike Piazza. Impressive, Macho Men! Even team rivalries on the diamond have become seriously compromised -- Yankees-Red Sox, Yankees-Mariners, Yankees-Braves -- in the same way Martina Hingis' alleged competition with Anna Kournikova went by the wayside. Dissed the Swiss Miss memorably: "What rivalry? I win all the time."

For sure, in all our other jock pastimes, the Bears will always have the Packers; the Cowboys, the Redskins; the Avalanche, the Red Wings; the Lakers, the Celtics; Alabama will have Auburn and Duke, North Carolina (well, maybe). But as far as the players? Other than some yacking wideouts exchanging pleasantries with some smacking d-backs as a pass play unfolds or when they tumble out of bounds, there are few great quarterbacks left to match wits with fewer legendary defenders. Given his one terrific challenge last season, the ultracompetitive Bret Favre flopped like a beached flounder so that Michael Strahan could waddle into his silly sack record. And the most compelling rivalry in basketball surely must be Shaq against Kobe -- and they're on the same team! (We think.)

Which leaves Sampras, 31, and Agassi, 32, who, having kicked away the sands of yesteryear and Christopher Columbused an astounding 1,492 combined career match victories, came together again at Flushing Meadow. Moreover, take Sampras' energy-depleting fifth-match-in-seven-days schedule and remove the World's No. 1, Lleyton Hewitt, from the equation -- the same Hewitt who softened up Sampras in the 2000 semifinals, who beat up Sampras in the 2001 final and who obviously stole a bucket of starch and much of his crispness from Agassi in this year's semis on Saturday -- and the ancient compadres might still be wailing away at each other through the changing seasons at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

"If I'm not allowed to be in the final, I'd love to see these two guys go for it. I think everyone would. I think it's great for men's tennis," the relatively infant Hewitt (21) said after losing to Agassi. "But sooner or later, when they do retire, the only downside is people are going to keep wanting to see Agassi-Sampras finals and it's not going to be there ... five, 10 years time."

The combatants also acknowledged the significance, possibly even the finality, of the occasion. "A nice toast to the past," Agassi called it. "Nothing in my career compares to playing against Pete, the best I've ever faced. (He) forces you to get that rush of blood, that makes you do a little something special. We're opposite in everything we do, two styles; it allows for many aspects of the game to reveal themselves and it's exciting to play against (him) because every point, something special seems like it can happen."

"The last time?" Sampras replied. "I think we're both aware of that. The game is so strong today, it's hard to say if we're going to meet each other again in a Slam final. So it's something I think we'll both appreciate as we get a little bit older. When we're done playing, we'll look back at these moments and know they're pretty special."

Sampras-Agassi might not be Ali-Frazier or Nicklaus-Palmer or Affirmed-Alydar or even Evert-Navratilova in their own sport -- the two women who faced each other no less than 80 times, 22 of the matches in Grand Slams (Martina leads Chris 43-37 and 14-8, pending their next match at the Grey Gables Rest Home Member-Guest). But the fact is the two men, so different in background and persona, so alike in historic credentials, started this thing in the Roman Spring of 1989 with Sampras piecing together a mere three clay-dusted games against Agassi. They continued it as not only beloved legends but heroic symbols -- the Open will always be the American Sporting Event most closely aligned with the tragedy of 9-11 -- and sage veterans who've been thoroughly domesticated by their celebrity wives, Ms. Graf a fairly new mother, Ms. Wilson three months from childbirth herself. And they (may) have ended it, after Sampras' 33 aces and a heartfelt embrace at the net, as the first 30-somethings to play for the national championship in nearly three quarters of a century -- Bill Tilden, 36, beating Frank Hunter, 35, in 1929 -- and as surefire enshrinees somewhere in the iconic wing of Geezerdom.

Somewhere, say, smack alongside the other great American rivals of the Open era, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, who scratched and clawed at each other through 15 noisy, flem-fouled years. Weirdly enough (or maybe not; these are tennis players), McEnroe -- "I'm just proud to be here watching these great champions," the hard-to-please Mac gurgled on CBS -- came out on top of that competition, both overall and in Slam meetings -- by the exact same score Sampras now leads Agassi: 20-14 in total matches and 6-3 in majors.

On Sunday, after Agassi got blistered early by the startling ferocity of Sampras' deliveries and energy; after he finally locked into the third set and bravely refused to give in to an obviously (on the day) better player -- Pete out-pointed Andre 151-126 and his winners-to-errors margin was a whopping 38-6 differential -- the match took on reverberations of the pair's breathtaking and brilliant quarterfinal battle in in the Open last year, which Sampras won over four tiebreaks. "A higher sort of quality of a match as far as consistently speaking," Agassi said in tenniswonk-speak.

And yet the intensity of the latter stages -- when an innervated Agassi kept pounding increasingly more effective groundies; a staggering Sampras, fatigued and punch-drunk, kept delaying and rope-a-doping his way out of trouble; and the excited crowd, roaring for Andre, sensed that one tiny break the Las Vegan's way and the contest would go to a fifth set where Shaved Head might rampage all over his exhausted opponent -- gave the event a mythical feel.

When CBS' own poetess, Mary Carillo, starts quoting T.S. Eliot, it probably means mere sport has been transcended by something else.

"This one might take the cake," Sampras said of his 14th major title, which is two more than anyone else in history. "One of my better efforts. The serve was just clicking. Just sitting there to go out, then playing, the crowd was so electric, the atmosphere was awesome ... It touched me. But in the trenches, you've got to focus on the next point.

"This was my Super Bowl. These moments are what I still play for," said the champ. "I played as well as I could today. You have to against him. The guy is a great player. No disrespect to anybody, but he's the best I've played. He brings out the best in me. I've always said that. I've needed him over my career. He's pushed me, forced me to get better. Up at the net at the end, that was a great moment."

So would this be, away from the net, the end? Go home with Bridgette to await the new baby? Chill out at the L.A. mansion ... play golf ... do lunch ... prop your beloved Lakers with Jack?

"Right now it's really hard to talk about, I mean, my head's spinning," said Pete. "I'm gonna have to weigh it in the next couple months to see where I'm at. To beat a rival like Andre in a major at the U.S. Open. (That's) a storybook ending. It might be nice to stop. ... But I still want to compete. I still love to play."

And you, Andre? If you and the other guy don't meet at this level again, is that good enough? Can you leave it at this?

"I could have left it before today," Agassi said. "... I don't think 'happy' for Pete is quite the way to put it. A lot of respect for the work he's put into getting himself this opportunity and in the way he went about today. It's great for him. But ... I mean, I take what I can get. Hopefully, it will happen again."

Hopefully. For all of us.

Curry Kirkpatrick is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at curry.kirkpatrick@espnmag.com.