BARELY two months ago, Coco Gauff was a shaky tennis teenager possibly heading into the sport’s wilderness, struggling to answer questions about how someone who had once appeared so precocious, so destined for greatness, could still be waiting for her big moment.

Fast forward to September, and she is US Open finalist, the star attraction of her home Grand Slam tournament and the new face of her sport in America.

Gauff, the 19-year-old prodigy from South Florida, beat Karolina Muchova of the Czech Republic in straight sets on Friday to reach her first US Open singles final, where she will square off against second-seed Aryna Sabalenka from Belarus.

The sixth-seeded Gauff had been tested as never before by Muchova’s all-court game and the strangest of atmospherics, but in the end the match went her way in front a crowd that exploded for her from start to finish.

“Some of those points were so loud, I don’t know if my ears are going to be OK,” she said in the post-match on-court interview.

Waiting for her in the final on Sunday morning (Singapore time) is Salabenka, the 25-year-old who will become the world No 1 when the new rankings come out next week.

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Sabalenka clinched her spot in the championship showdown in a topsy-turvy, three-set slugfest against American Madison Keys.

“Amazing player,” Sabalenka later said of Gauff. “I’ll be fighting for every point.”

Gauff was controlling her match when a climate protest early in the second set – she was leading 6-4, 1-0 at the time – caused a nearly 50-minute delay. Security officials struggled to remove the protesters, one of whom had glued his feet to the concrete in one of the upper levels of the stadium.

Gauff later said that she woke up that very morning thinking that a climate protest might break out, as they had at the French Open in 2022 and Wimbledon this year.

Maybe that was a premonition. Maybe it was preparation by a player with a well-earned reputation for always doing her homework. She earned her diploma on time in the spring of last year despite spending all her high school years on the professional tour. She and her family celebrated in Paris, then she won six matches at the French Open before losing to the world No 1 Iga Swiatek, in the final on a day when she said the moment overwhelmed her.

The unforeseen delay took the wind out of a capacity crowd of nearly 24,000 fans who arrived ready to celebrate a new American tennis queen, a year after watching Serena Williams play her last match that signalled the end of an era for American tennis.

Over the past four years, Gauff has evolved into the most likely candidate to fill the void, breaking out at Wimbledon when she was 15 and making her French Open run last year. Since then, though, her progress seemed to stall, especially on the big stages, and she had yet to move past the quarterfinals of the US Open, the tournament where the spotlight shines brighter on her than anywhere else.

“I’m having way more fun than I was three years ago,” she said.

Two months ago, this run, and a championship that is now one match away, didn’t seem possible, but in the semi-final Gauff showed every reason it suddenly is. She has long had so many of the tools needed to join the sport’s elite – a dangerous serve, a tough-as-nails backhand, and the speed and athleticism that combine for the best court coverage in the women’s game.

She would need all those tools to get past Muchova. She needed six match points to close out the match, and how fitting that the penultimate one was a lung-busting, 40-shot rally filled with a slew of shots hit within inches of the net. Gauff dug deep and closed it out with a forehand winner on the approach.

The American had inklings both before and in the middle of that marathon point. She said she knew a point like that was coming, and knew that she had both the legs and the lungs for it and that it would just be a matter of patience.

As the balls flew back and forth, she began to think that this point would change the match and if she could win it, Muchova would not be able to survive yet another long test on the next match point. Gauff fought off one last sharp serve from Muchova and hung on until the latter’s backhand sailed long.

New York has been firmly on Gauff’s side since her first match of the tournament a fortnight ago, and now all that’s left is one more match – the championship showdown – to overcome. NYTIMES