The 45-year-old Venus Williams, long absent from the tour, returned to the tennis court in Washington, D.C., this week, thanks to a wild card into the WTA 500 event.

Like so many other wild cards granted to aging legendary players, it seemed like the goal was to delight fans, rather than to invite a player who could realistically advance in the tournament. Williams had spent much of last year recovering from a surgery to remove uterine fibroids, a condition she had been dealing with for decades. She hadn’t played a match since March 2024, and she hadn’t won a match since August 2023. But when she proposed the idea of a comeback to her friend, the billionaire tournament owner Mark Ein, he immediately embraced it.

What should we expect? A pleasant homage to one of the sport’s greats—but not much of a real tennis match. At least, that was the cynic’s outlook heading into Tuesday evening, when Williams wound up becoming the oldest player to win a WTA singles match since Martina Navratilova in 2004. The elder Williams sister had clearly tuned up her game for more than a quick nostalgic hitting session, and she defeated world No. 35 Peyton Stearns, 6–3, 6–4.

In those two sets we saw many of the familiar stamps of Venus’ tennis. The graceful baseline power, courtesy of long levers moving with immaculate timing. Sometimes, watching an older player, you can see clearly that the game has passed them by; they haven’t yet invented ball-striking that can outclass a Williams sister. In her best rallies, the pace and depth coming off of Venus’ racquet were on par with the heaviest hitters of the present. It had been a long time since I saw her distinctive super-early preparation and low take-back on the backhand, running out to the ball with the racquet already stowed away, ready to fire. And since few things in a tennis game age better than a serve, she was in a deadly rhythm throughout the match, breaking the 110 mph mark several times and racking up nine aces.

After she pulled off the upset, Williams offered the crowd a big smile, a twirl, and a concise commentary on American health care. “I had to come back for the insurance, because they informed me earlier this year I’m on COBRA. So I was like, I got to get my benefits on, started training,” she said in her on-court interview. “Let me tell you, I’m always at the doctor, so I need this insurance.” (Sen. Bernie Sanders shared the video on social media to argue that the country needed Medicare for All, if even its millionaires were struggling with the system.)

For all the age-defying thrills of Tuesday’s upset, Williams’ second-round match on Thursday proved that there are at least two things that become way, way harder for an athlete in her fifth decade: recovery and movement. It had been nearly two years since she’d had to play two professional singles matches in the same week. She also played two doubles matches this week, and the fatigue was obvious midway through the first set. Her second-round opponent, world No. 24 Magdalena Frech, had a good enough finesse game to send her slices and short balls that kept Williams scrambling along the court’s vertical axis. Add in the fact that Williams herself couldn’t find the same rhythm on serve, and she wound up with a relatively uneventful 6–2, 6–2 loss.

“Oh, I had so much fun,” Williams said afterward. “Definitely not the result I wanted, but still a learning experience. The part about sport [and] life is that you never stop learning.” She’ll be back on court soon in Cincinnati, where she’s got another wild card, and then again at the US Open, where she will be playing, at the very least, in the star-studded mixed-doubles tournament. While she’s been coy about her precise plans for this comeback, and one might reasonably read “retirement tour” as the subtext, this week has made me even more curious about the tennis she still has left to give.