It was 10 o’clock almost exactly on the last Friday night of the U.S. Open and two American men were having the kind of moment that American men hadn’t had for a long time at this tournament and inside Arthur Ashe Stadium, the biggest tennis stadium in Grand Slam tennis. So the Open was making a tennis sound for Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe that only it can make. The fourth set had just begun. Tiafoe led two sets to one. He was that close to playing for this country’s national championship in men’s tennis on Sunday afternoon. He had just ripped another crosscourt forehand that made the crowd at Ashe come to him again, all the way from the top of the place. He would play Jannik Sinner, the No. 1 player in the world in the final on Sunday. Or Fritz, whose mother had played in the quarterfinals of the first Open played at the National Tennis Center in 1978, would come all the way back and he’d get a shot at winning the first Open title for an American man since Andy Roddick more than 20 years ago. So this was a moment for two young guys, both 26, who had come up through the junior ranks together, and from wildly different backgrounds. But the Open wasn’t going to care which one of them had the better story now. It just wanted to find out which one of them was better over what was going to be the most important hour of their tennis lives. It would be Fritz: The southern California kid whose mother, Kathy May, had grown up in Beverly Hills, the great-granddaughter of David May, who founded the company that would become Macy’s. It was not going to be Tiafoe, the wildly popular son of parents who had come to this country from Sierra Leone, and settled in Maryland, where the father became the custodian of a tennis club. This was Taylor Fritz’s magic hour at Ashe Stadium. He was the one with the most game in the end, the most fight. He is the one who gets to fight for the title that Jimmy Connors won on this site once the Open moved to the tennis side of Roosevelt Ave. from Forest Hills, and John McEnroe, and Pete Sampras, and Andre Agassi and finally Roddick, until no American man has for such a long time. “This is the reason why I do what I do,” Fritz said on the court when it was over, his voice breaking on a night when his game had finally broken Tiafoe’s. It would be 6-1 for Fritz in the fifth set. But he had won this match in the fourth set, when he had turned the night around. Fritz really started winning this match for good in the seventh game of that set, in a grueling 31-shot rally that he finally won to get that game to 40-15 on his serve, on his way to a 4-3 lead. At the finish of the point, Tiafoe simply stopped running on his side of the court, near his backhand alley. He would win just two more games in the match after that. This was a moment, too. Of truth. For both of them. Fritz also talked afterward about how well Tiafoe had played in the first set and into the second, when it looked as if he might take a two sets to none lead. “He was overwhelming from the baseline,” Fritz said. “I was freaking out a little bit.” But Fritz won that set and even after Tiafoe won the third. It was the California kid Fritz — whose mother had never made it past the quarterfinals of a major the way Fritz hadn’t until this week and this Open — who raised himself and his level and kept playing himself, serve at a time, rally at a time, baseline winner at a time, to Sunday afternoon. Frances Tiafoe He wasn’t supposed to make it this far at this Open, but now he has. He isn’t supposed to beat Sinner in the men’s final, first for an American man since Roddick in 2006. But he is going to have his chance, on a day when the crowd will come to him the way it has come to Tiafoe for years; in what has a chance to be one of the great days American men’s tennis has ever had, as Fritz has the opportunity to write an improbable ending to one of the best Opens we’ve ever had, in what has become the most ridiculously expensive public park anywhere. It will all play out in the stadium named in Arthur Ashe’s honor, at a facility named after another southern California tennis kid named Billie Jean King. Fritz gets this shot at the title late Sunday afternoon because he had himself a night, did he ever, on Friday. “[Tiafoe] hit some kind of wall, physical or mental,” John McEnroe said at one point on television. He did. His legs seemed gone at the end. But know that he also got hit by Fritz over the last set-and-a-half, in this match and on this night when Fritz showed as much heart and as much resilience as he ever had on a tennis court, certainly in a setting like this. He was asked on the court what he was telling himself when he was being overwhelmed, when it still looked like Tiafoe’s moment, and he said, “I told myself I can’t wait.” Truly, Fritz had waited his whole life for a night like this, for the magic hour of tennis he played between 10 and 11 at Ashe on Friday. Now he’s in a national championship game against Sinner. He gets his chance to do what Connors and McEnroe and Sampras and Agassi and Roddick did on these grounds because when it was all on the line in the semis, with the final right there in front of him, he was the one who wrote the best story. 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Here is what Brian Cashman said the other day in Chicago, explaining why the Yankees are staying with Alex Verdugo in left field: “So the evaluations that we’re having with our field staff and player development staff and front office staff is just what is going to give us the best chance to win, and as of right now, we’re staying pat with what we’ve got, but we’re always in the position to change our minds at some point, too.” And there you have it. There was Jordan Love in Brazil on Friday night, trying to make a play at the end of a game his team was about to lose to the Eagles, his leg twisting underneath him like a pretzel in such an ugly way. When it did, Love made every Packer fan in this world remembering what happened to a former Packer quarterback named Rodgers a year ago as Love limped off the field. I have to be honest, Boston College beating Florida State that way in its opener, and doing that on the road, didn’t stink. Did Brian Kelly seem upset to you after USC beat his LSU team? Because he seemed kind of upset to me. Somebody explain to me what kept the Yankees from getting Michael Kopech at the trade deadline. Or Jason Adam. Or Tanner Scott. Everybody wants to start out 1-0 in the NFL. But 1-0 would mean as much to the Giants as it does to anybody else in the league. The Jets don’t have to make the Super Bowl this year. They just have to make the playoffs for the first time since Rex was coach. If you don’t think Clay Holmes has had a sketchy year as the Yankee closer, look how giddy everybody got because Luke Weaver got three outs at Wrigley on Friday afternoon. David Stearns has done one pretty terrific job in his first year running baseball ops with the Mets. “Slow Horses” is back and I’m good, because the show is still great. Maybe one of these days, as crazy as this sounds, we could worry more in this country about banning automatic weapons than books. We all know it is still a small sampling for Anthony Volpe. But after Friday’s game, in his second season, he was hitting .252 with an on-base percentage of .302. Now that Rudy Giuliani’s assets have been seized because of that defamation lawsuit on which he got rung up in Georgia — does he get to keep his World Series rings What, too soon? Starting Monday night in Santa Clara, Aaron Rodgers gets his chance to do what only Tom Brady has ever done: Be a great quarterback after the age of 40. People keep saying Scottie Scheffler is boring, and I keep wondering when Jack Nicklaus was the life of the party when he didn’t have a driver in his hands. Nick Saban and Bill Belichick are both really good on television. There. I said it. You know who also had a moment on Friday night, on the baseball side of Roosevelt Ave.? Mark Vientos. Mike Lupica’s new Jane Smith thriller written with James Patterson, “Hard to Kill,” just spent its fifth week on the Publishers Weekly Best Seller list for hardcover fiction.