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After she'd done something remarkable to begin her U.S. Open – win a match – someone tried to ask Eugenie Bouchard about the fall.

"A year ago, you were the darling of the tennis world …" the reporter started out.

Bouchard cut the person off, smiling tightly.

"So I'm not any more?"

Well, no. If that's news to Bouchard, she's the last one to find out.

A year ago, she played the main courts here. Now she's off to the side. Then, the crowds frothed for her. Yesterday, they didn't seem to care much either way. Her postmatch pressers were thronged. On Monday, 18 people showed up to hear her give herself a pep talk.

It's a long way up the mountain. Only 21 years old, Bouchard's already down the other side. She's taken all the sudden hopefulness of Canadian tennis with her.

One sure sign is the panicked embrace of (shudder) philosophy.

"I've been thinking [that] it's not as bad as everyone is making it seem … [If] I hadn't achieved the results I had last year, then would everyone be freaking out about the results this year?" Bouchard told TSN in the lead-up.

"I still have a ranking in the top 30. I'm able to play tennis. I still have skill. I still lead a wonderful life."

She repeated those points nearly verbatim on Monday. This isn't an idea. It's a mantra.

In the real world, you'd call it perspective. In pro sports, it's loser talk.

For most of the season, Bouchard has been trying to switch the narrative before and after Grand Slams. She hasn't lasted long enough to do it during.

In Australia, it was "a new beginning." Shortly thereafter, the wheels fell off, rolled into someone's house, caught fire and burned down a metaphoric subdivision.

By the French Open, Bouchard was "Sticking To Her Game Plan." By Wimbledon, it was "one day at a time." It didn't work out in either case.

Ahead of arriving at Flushing Meadows, she torched her new coach and called up human good-vibration Jimmy Connors for advice.

Connors, keen to do a favour and not keen to get professionally duct-taped to a rolling disaster, was especially keen that people understand one thing about his involvement with Bouchard: that he is not – repeat not – her coach. He didn't stick around to watch her play.

Whatever he said to her – it was apparently long on motivation and short on tactics – had some effect.

In her debut, Bouchard looked a good deal better than we've grown used to in the last little while. This is not to say it was particularly good.

Facing American Alison Riske, an opponent she's knocked around like a wiffle ball in recent years, Bouchard trudged to a plodding 6-4, 6-3 victory in withering heat. It was only her fourth win in the last 18 matches.

Afterward, she didn't seem happy or relieved. She seemed surprised. She seemed like she'd forgotten how it feels to finish a match and not also feel the urge to jam everything in her bag and flee the court like a crime scene.

This is a reminder to all of us – don't get used to nice tennis things. We haven't earned the right.

Last year at this same time, Canadian tennis reached its historic height. Bouchard and Milos Raonic were coming off remarkable runs at Wimbledon. The 2014 U.S. Open felt like the potential beginning of a long run of dominance.

It's starting to look like the end of a small, if consequential, blip.

Raonic is having his own problems, and there's also a little philosophy creeping in. He won Monday as well, against a similarly underwhelming opponent and in the same torpid fashion. The heat was plainly killing him. By the end of the 6-4, 7-6, 6-1 result against 99th-ranked Tim Smyczek, Raonic was beginning to resemble boiled meat. Hobbled by injury, he's only played two matches since Wimbledon. He lost both.

The serve is still pneumatic. When he topped out at 229 km/h early, the crowd squealed with delight. They didn't seem to care that he'd missed it.

He's better off than Bouchard – he's stalled rather than in free fall. But he's leaning hard on the same defeatist ideas.

"Last year was … a pleasant surprise," Raonic said. "I think this year it's maybe been people expecting things to go up, up, up as quick as it was last year. It never is that way."

Respectfully, it is. Sports are inertial. Once things get headed in a direction – up or down – they tend to keep going that way.

Raonic knows it, too. Like Bouchard, he's flailing about, trying to find some meaning in decline.

"[I]'ve missed the feeling of just being able to play tennis without thinking twice," he said. "It hasn't always been that way for the last few months. It's been more 'Can I do this? Can I do that?'"

In most cases, the answer has been "No."

The problem isn't just that Bouchard and Raonic aren't playing well. It's that while saying all the good Zen things about taking it as it comes, they have no clue how that might look. You're starting to suspect they don't believe there's a way out, or a next level to reach. They've given up trying to.

Desperate for someone, anyone, to take the bit like they mean it, Canada turned earlier this summer to Vasek Pospisil.

He may not have Raonic's or Bouchard's natural gifts, but he wears the talent he has with far more ease. At the least, he seems like he's having fun.

It didn't look like fun on Monday. Pospisil raged through the first half of a match with Andreas Haider-Maurer. By the fourth set, he was flat on his back, suffering through a cramp. He lost 4-6, 6-3, 7-6, 0-6, 1-6. Pospisil's breakout at Wimbledon seems like a long time ago.

Everything about their form suggests Bouchard and Raonic will follow him soon enough, putting the season out of its misery.

You could call it a forgettable year for Canadian tennis. But that would suggest you believe things will change.

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