With best serve ever, Serena Williams will continue to win well into her 30s

Serena Williams has won so many Grand Slam titles, several of them in dominant fashion, that they all blend together like the blueberries, orange juice, hemp powder and spinach I mix when I decide a healthy breakfast is needed. 

The result is that there aren't too many moments that stand out, there aren't many stills that I can picture when thinking of her dominance in women's tennis.

I'm pretty sure, however, that a moment — or, rather, 49 seconds — from Williams' 6-1, 5-7, 6-2 Wimbledon final victory over Agnieszka Radwanska will last with me and many tennis fans for years to come.

It came in the pivotal third set, a set no one on this earth except, maybe, Radwanska thought possible after Williams exerted her power and will during a one-sided first set. Trailing 2-1, Williams stepped up to the baseline and dropped in a powerful serve.

Radwanska didn't move. 

Williams received a new ball from the ball boy or girl — I wasn't monitoring that too closely — and stepped to the ad side of the baseline and uncorked another enormous serve.

Radwanska barely twitched.

You get the point (or, more accurately, Williams grabbed four straight points without Radwanska coming close to making any kind of contact with the ball). The game had commentator and 18-time grand slam winner Chris Evert gushing from ESPN's box. It had other tennis greats wondering, via Twitter, if such a thing had EVER been done on the lady's tour (which, remember, has been around a long time — since Billie Jean King created it in 1973).

She might not admit it, but those 49 seconds, that sense of helplessness she must have felt on Centre Court, finally broke the very-game Radwanska. In the next game, Williams finally got the critical break of serve. She didn't come close to losing a game the rest of the way.

When Williams powered a final backhand winner to close out the match, she fell to the court in jubilation. It's easy for the casual sports fan to think that with those missile-sized biceps and athleticism, tennis and winning comes easy for Williams. 

They're, of course, forgetting or ignoring all the obstacles she's overcome and how much work she's put into the sport that she loves and the opportunity to be the best of her generation on the one surface in life where she feels completely comfortable. 

Williams' fifth Wimbledon win matched her sister Venus' handful of championships and gave her 14 grand slam singles — just four shy of Evert and Navratilova's 18. Steffi Graf's 22 majors still seems untouchable. 

Williams is capable of eclipsing Evert and Navratilova's number even playing in her 30s, but more on that in a second. First, it needs to be mentioned why Williams was so emotional after the final ball had been hit in London. 

As polished as her tennis resume is, Williams' career has been bumpier than most Washington, DC roads (if you can't picture the comparison, come visit). Missing a pair of majors during the 2006 season due to a serious knee injury, falling completely out of the rankings and needing a wild card to compete at the U.S. Open couldn't have been easy for a seven-time major champion.

It was nothing compared to Williams' past two years. After a masterful performance at Wimbledon in 2010 — a tournament during which she didn't drop a set — Williams was again on top of the sport, No. 1 in the world.

Then, in a freak, accident, she cut her foot at a restaurant and needed 18 stitches. Still sidelined in early 2011, Williams confirmed she suffered hematoma and a pulmonory embolism while on a flight from New York to L.A. I won't get into the medical details, but the seriousness of the injury boils down to one sentence:

Serena Williams could have died from it.

Thankfully, Williams made a full recovery, returned to tennis almost a year after her world nearly shattered, and now here she is, today, a major champion again — the first 30-year-old grand slam women's winner since Navratilova 22 years ago.

Which brings me back to that serve.

Evert said blatantly that it's better than half of the serves on the men's tour. Williams easily set a Wimbledon women's record for aces, with over 100. Ask Radwanska about it.

And that serve — so precise every time, the ball reaching the same apex before Williams' racket thunders through it; poor ball — will allow Williams to remain a force on a weakened, who's-turn-is-it-today? women's tour for quite sometime. 

(Fun fact: Each of the past seven grand slam tournaments have been won by a different woman. On the men's side, there have only been four finalists!.)

Williams isn't the best mover on tour. Her net game leaves something to be desired. And she's not getting younger (although when asked during the trophy presentation if 30 is the new 20, she responded, "Oh my GOD, of course, hello!."). But with the best serve by a woman ever, with that ability to win games solely on her serve, Williams can continue to win majors — if not as smoothly as in 2010.

Then again, nothing has come easily for her since that last major. 

Which only makes celebrations like Saturday's that much more enjoyable and rewarding. 

I suspect we'll be seeing more of them for another handful of years.

Can Andy Murray deliver on the biggest of stages?

Andy Murray is only 25. If healthy, the Brit will likely play in dozens of more majors — well after the great Roger Federer has laced up his shoes for a final time. 

But 25 in tennis isn't 25 in baseball; Rafael Nadal, 26, and Novak Djokovic, 25, aren't going anywhere; and from somewhere, you have to figure, new young hotshots are close to bursting through on the tour to, at the very least, win a few big matches and put a scare into the big boys.

Which is why, this Wimbledon is Murray's LeBron James moment. 

(I promise: This won't be a post full of Murray-LeBron comparisons, because that would be nonsensical; a basketball and tennis player only have so much in common.)

With each major that Murray fails to win, the pressure only grows. By now, any tennis fan knows what's at stake — despite being the birthplace of tennis, Great Britain hasn't produced a Grand Slam winner since the great Fred Perry (eight titles) won at the All England Club in 1936. 

That's 76 years and counting.

Murray, at the moment, is the country's greatest — and lone — hope. Like LeBron (oops, rule broken), he's shouldered incredible pressure since emerging on tour about five years ago. Unlike LeBron, he can't take his talents to South Beach.

Rather, Murray is faced with the challenge of believing in himself against the world's best; of pushing himself to a place he's never been. The physical tools are there — the powerful serve, the consistent ground strokes, the ability to finish points at the net.

But to this point, Murray has wilted on the biggest of stages.

He's played in three Grand Slam finals and failed to win a set, succumbing to Federer twice and Djokovic once. He didn't show much life in any of the three matches. Similarly, he's lost in six major semifinals to the Big Three, and only once — in this year's Aussie Open, when he fell to Djokovic — has he pushed his opponent to the brink.

In Wednesday's quarterfinal victory (6-7, 7-6, 6-4, 7-6) over the "Little Beast" David Ferrer, Murray showed the type of resolve he'll absolutely need for the entirety of a match if he's to break through this weekend and win that elusive Grand Slam over Federer or Djokovic (first, of course, he has to face Jo-Wilfried Tsonga Friday in the semifinals). 

Murray displayed toughness, grit and a bounce-back ability that, to be frank, has usually been the separating factor between the Big Three (32 major titles between them) and him. 

After dropping the first set in a tiebreaker, which had me groaning, "Oh, typical Murray; can't win the big points," the Brit found himself down 5-2 in the second set tiebreaker. He stood two points from being down two sets against a player in Ferrer whose motor never slows down. 

Instead, Murray responded with aggressive shot-making to take the tiebreaker 8-6. Match on.

The third set appeared headed for yet another tiebreaker, but with Ferrer serving at 4-4, Murray unleashed a pair of killer groundstrokes to break the Spaniard then served out the set at love. 

Killer instinct.

Against an opponent like Ferrer, Murray knew there would be no easy final set, and the players battled back and forth until the usual London rain delay halted play at 4-4. Leading up to the stoppage, Murray showed the let's-get-this-done attitude that he's carried all tournament, not wasting a second between points and throwing 130-mph serves to the inside and wide of Ferrer.

He wasn't in the mood for messing around, even up a set. A couple rounds earlier, Murray had done the same thing to finish off Marcos Baghdatis just a couple minutes after an 11p.m. "curfew" to finish play for the day.

In the final set tiebreak — what else? — Murray used all the strength he had left in his body, firing back-to-back aces up the middle to take a 4-3 lead. Leading 5-4, he then set up match point brilliantly with an array of groundstrokes to Ferrer's baseline before a steaming forehand winner up the line.

A point later, Murray left no doubt with his third ace of the tiebreak. 

After 4 hours on Centre Court, Murray raised his hands in triumph, but only for a fleeting moment. He'll save any big celebrations for Sunday.

Can he do it? That answer is impossible to know.

But with the pressure not going anywhere, Murray, an avid boxing fan, has displayed signs this fortnight of the package of jabs he needs to bring to center stage if he's going to knock out one of the Big Three and be toasted in England for many fortnights to come.