The crowd at Taco Mac told the story. Twenty televisions adorned every wall of the place, blasting out a variety of sporting events: baseball in one corner, the AT&T National golf tournament (won by Anthony Kim) in another, a soccer match and drag racing on a third and fourth. And not a soul watched any of it. All eyes in the packed house, including the servers, remained glued to the big screen where, like a hypnotist twirling a watch, two guys in white shorts prancing about on a manicured lawn held an eclectic audience spellbound for an entire afternoon.

Tennis: more specifically, the Wimbledon men’s final was, to quote one of the Taco Mac patrons, “Fan-friggin’-unbelievable-tastic!” That summed it up for everyone.

In case you missed it, the Sunday match-up at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, a place so haughty it makes Augusta National look like a West Texas pig pull, pitted world No. 1 Roger Federer against No. 2 Rafael Nadal. One of them would make history. Federer was looking to become the only guy to win six straight Wimbledon titles, and Nadal hoped to become the first man since 1980 to win the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year. Adding to the drama, the person who held both those records, Bjorn Borg, sat front and center in the Royal Box wearing a James Bond Seville Row suit and looking like the cream on his berries had curdled.

But alone that back-story wouldn’t have been enough to hold the interest of the average sports fan. Like the World Cup and Kentucky Derby, Wimbledon is one of those events that everyone watches because you’re supposed to – broadened horizons and all. Even if you don’t know a deuce court from a double play, you probably pass a glance at the spectacle. This time, if you paid attention, you saw an event no less an expert than John McEnroe called, “The greatest tennis match I’ve ever seen, and maybe the greatest that’s ever been played.”

To sum it up: Nadal lost one service game in seven hours, and still had to go to five-set double-overtime to win. If not for the third and fourth set “tie-breaks,” a hopelessly complicated and intuitively unfair do-or-die system that decides 6-6 ties (think sudden-death shootout after three periods of hockey) they might still be playing. 

And nobody would complain if they were. “The setting, the situation, the drama, the pressure, the tennis: it was unbelievable,” said Betsy Nagelsen-McCormack, who owns one of those silver runner-up plates from Wimbledon, and has a couple of Australian Open trophies on her bookshelf. “I was watching it at the (Nick Bollettieri) Academy with a couple of guys who played the tour, and they were just laughing at how crazy the quality of the shots were. Time and time again, it was just unbelievable.”

As for whether it was the best ever, Betsy said, “It was the best I’ve ever seen, and, yeah, I mean, how do you get any better than that?”

Back at Taco Mac the room buzzed about the “different gear” Federer seemed to have whenever he appeared on the brink of losing – “Dude’s a witch or something,” one guy offered as an explanation -- and the guts and athleticism Nadal showed to weather three championship points before finally putting it away 9-7 in the fifth.

But it was afterward, when the bows were taken and both men spoke to the fans, each praising the other; each displaying a level of class rarely seen in sports today: only then did the impact of the match become apparent. A generation that had turned away from the courts turned back for a few hours. And some could return for good.

Will it be remembered past next week? For fans of the game the answer is: “What, are you joking?” For the rest of the world, the impact of Wimbledon 08 was verbalized perfectly on the floor of a Georgia Taco Mac by a guy with a Fu Manchu mustache carrying 20 extra pounds underneath his Chipper Jones jersey.

“Makes you want to go play some tennis, don’t it?” he said to anyone within earshot.

That it did. That it did.