Torch not Madison Keys' yet

— -- A passing of the torch. It's such a pretty phrase -- such a heartwarming image. Heck, it's downright ceremonial, and easily conjures up images of a flaming beacon being passed between hands clad in white gloves, with grave nods all around.

The reality, of course, can be quite different -- and perhaps never more so than in sports. As we saw Wednesday afternoon at the Australian Open in the clash between No. 18 seed Venus Williams and Madison Keys, those proverbial torches are sometimes grabbed, yanked back, dropped, leaped upon, thrust at the taker's eye and grappled over in a manner worthy of a mud-wrestling contest.

It can get to the point where even human-interest tidbits like that cute story about the Venus Williams dress that 4-year-old Madison Keys coveted begin to seem less than germane.

Make no mistake, Williams was not in any stinking torch-passing mood. Nineteen-year-old Keys had to grab the thing and wrench it out of her hands in a match that was often ugly but rarely uninteresting. Keys won it in just under two hours, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4.

Keys will have exactly 24 hours to hold the torch and enjoy its glow, because after that interval she will have the unenviable task of trying to keep Venus' sister Serena from ripping it out of her grasp on behalf of the entire Williams family.

This match was no great work of art. Venus had trouble finding her range from start to finish, and a left thigh injury impaired Keys starting in the fifth game of the second set. Both women donated a liberal amount of unforced errors. At one of the low points early in the third set, TV commentator and supercoach Martina Navratilova observed, "The worse Venus hits the ball the more errors Madison makes."

This was a struggle between a game and admirable 34-year-old woman who hasn't been to a Grand Slam semifinal since 2010 and a physically hampered ingénue who had never been to a major semifinal anywhere, anytime. Could it be that this was a less than ideal quarterfinal matchup at the first big event of the year?

Williams won just 30 percent of her second-serve points in the match, struck just 10 winners and kicked in 38 unforced errors. All in all, she looked like a woman who had just plain run out of steam -- but resolved to still go down swinging. Keys was even more generous to her rival, making 45 unforced errors. But to her credit, she also delivered 34 stone-cold winners and broke serve more often when it really mattered, cashing in on seven of nine break points. (Williams made five of 10.)

Keys got off to a great start. She won the first set in 29 minutes and showed no sign of nerves until the third game of the second set, when she appeared to realize that perhaps it all was going a little too smoothly. Unnerved, she was broken twice in succession, which left Williams with a 4-1 lead. Worse yet, Keys tweaked her upper left adductor -- the same muscle that forced her to withdraw from Wimbledon last July.

"It was definitely a kind of a flashback to Wimbledon for me." Keys told the press later. "It was kind of scary. But luckily was able to catch it before I did any real damage to it. The painkillers and adrenaline in the end kind of helped me get through it."

The other props that helped Keys craft this triumph were her willingness to go big and bold when she had the opportunity and her willingness to exercise restraint on the advice of her new coach, Lindsay Davenport. "[Davenport] was just saying that [Venus] is going to have great serves; she's going to have great shots. It's one of those things where when she starts playing really well, you can't panic or get too far ahead of yourself."

Keys' ability to follow those instructions was central to her win. It also pointed to a potentially career-shaping takeaway from this match. Both early and late in this rhomboidal contest, Keys managed to play lethal first-strike tennis while remaining completely within herself. Goodness knows how many big blasts she fired, but none was launched recklessly. She has a mature, comprehensive grasp of this game and is already expert at leavening her formidable power with guile and patience.

"I give a lot of credit to her because she really set her points up," Williams said in her postmatch presser. "She was swinging freely. Most of them went in for her. So it was just, you know, great for her."

Keys remained on message even when she was hampered by nerves or distracted by the pain in her leg. The faculty was striking in one four-point stretch in the first game of the third set.

Keys was struggling at the time. She had already fought off one break point, but Williams was still threatening. A down-the-line backhand error provided Williams with another break point. Keys responded with a crackling inside-out backhand winner. At deuce, the women exchanged groundstrokes, and Keys took the initiative and attacked the net. Williams fired a fine passing shot, but Keys played a pretty, sharply angled forehand touch volley from below the net for another clean winner. She finished up the game with another down-the-line backhand, this one a winner.

At some point in the future, Keys probably will play a game like that in a critical match and it will be considered a glorious turning point. This was not such a day, mainly because of the numerous shifts of momentum, including the one that enabled Williams to work her way to an opportunity to take a 4-2 lead in the third set. But Keys turned the tables one last time, winning five of the final six games, as well as the last eight points of the match.

Asked what made her most proud about her performance, Keys replied: "I think just being able to come back from being down and from not being able to move as well, not having as effective of a serve, just being able to kind of grind through that, still figure it out, manage to win some points is what I'm most happy about."

Enjoy the warmth and radiance of the torch, Ms. Keys. You've got at least 24 hours.