Cast your mind back. It is 2005, and the majestic Fed is marching towards the business end of the Australian Open in search of his fifth Grand Slam title. Standing in his way in the semifinals is the mercurial Marat Safin, the runner-up from 2004. Safin is a great player, but surely he cannot stop the champion from reaching another final. Oh, but he did – 9-7 in the fifth.
Come the final Sunday, Safin went on to break a million Australian hearts by beating Lleyton Hewitt and claiming the second Grand Slam trophy of his career. Happy days.
Since then, Federer and Safin's careers could not have been any more different. The record books will show that the Swiss has carved himself a place in history by winning almost everything in sight. Meanwhile, the world looks at Safin and sighs over what might have been.
Of all the players who could have challenged Federer's dominance at the top of the game, Safin had the talent to do it. A bear of a man, he had the raw power to make the Swiss sit up and take notice - and he was perhaps the only player who could match him for sublime talent.
Safin's game is not as silky smooth or as fluid as Federer's, but he can do almost anything he likes with the ball. He has the ability to invent shots on the fly and has the muscle power to turn a lost cause into an outrageous winner with a flick of the wrist – but it is not enough.
His career has been interrupted with monotonous regularity by a combination of injury and life. He reached the 2004 final on the back of a serious wrist injury and, after winning the title in 2005, had his progress curtailed by a long-term knee problem. And when his body was not breaking down, his mind was playing tricks with him.
Never happy in his role as one of the tour's celebrities, the pressure of being a huge talent with a massive personality wore him down. Wherever he went and whenever he played, someone wanted more from him. Safin has won two Grand Slam titles - and yet he is often viewed as a wasted talent. He likes to entertain the crowd and play his game his way, and yet his detractors accuse of him of lacking focus. The poor bloke cannot do right for doing wrong.
"What does it mean: "star"?" he once said. "There is no explanation for a star. A star is in the sky, and that's it.
"I'm living my life; I'm not living the life of anybody else. I want to live my life and I'm enjoying it very much and I'm doing well and I'm playing tennis and I'm having fun and I think I have a great life. At least I made it this way. I've been trying to live this life for a long time, so why I have to change something which is not broken?"
By the end of last year, as his results see-sawed madly from final here to first round loss there, Safin talked of retirement - and he looked thoroughly fed up with life. Luckily, he had time to cheer up over the winter break and now here he is again, into the third round after easing past Guillermo Garcia-Lopez 7-5 6-2 6-2, and waiting to meet that man Federer for the 12th time in his career.
The two old rivals have met three times since that heady night here in 2005, and Federer has won every time. Then again, those matches were all played on grass, a surface Safin finds to be both strange and unreliable. But the last showdown was in the semifinals at Wimbledon 2008 – and that was a meeting that Safin pulled out of the hat having not got beyond the fourth round of a Grand Slam since winning in Melbourne in 2005. Now, the Russian has the chance to turn the clock back four years and see if he can cause another upset.
"His life also changed," Safin said of Federer. "Didn't go too bad. He won a couple of Grand Slams afterwards. And me, I got injured. I had to recover from the injuries, so we went in different ways. He got much more confident throughout the years, and I had to recover from injury. So I want to be in his shoes. But, anyway, it's our lives."
Standing on the wrong end of a 9-2 losing record against Federer and with no real form coming into the Open, few would have been willing to out their money on Safin. But as the Russian pointed out, "We know each other pretty well. He knows how to play against me; I know how to play against him. Whatever comes, comes."
That is one of the greatest weapons in Safin's arsenal – with Marat, you just never know.
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