“I just stepped on court thinking it was going to be a tough, tough battle,” Fonseca said. “I know his potential. He just won against Novak. He can be very solid. He has every groundstroke. He plays good on the surface.

“Playing against those guys for me, I mean, I just try to think as any other player. Of course, sometimes it comes [with] a little bit of pressure and thinking, but I mean, I just think I'm going to play with those guys for, I don't know, 10, 15 years.

“There's always a first time, so I just need to focus on what I need to do and not what he's doing and what he's capable of and what is his age. I think that's what I try to do and what I did as well.”

Silhouettes of fans crammed around the upper fringes of Court 14 began to stretch across the court as the afternoon light began to fade, at which point Prizmic had barely put a foot wrong.

The 20-year-old Croatian had endured a challenging stint since pushing his idol, Djokovic, in a four-hour first-round thriller at the 2024 Australian Open, but on clay in recent months it had all finally began to click again.

After beating Ben Shelton for his first top-10 win in Madrid, he took down his idol, Djokovic, in Rome and after 80 minutes on Wednesday, the Djokovic rematch was just a set away.

Fonseca needed to conjure up something special to prevent the all-Balkan affair. He would need to become just the third teenager this century to win a main-draw match in Paris from two sets down after Roger Federer in 2001 and Thanasi Kokkinakis in 2015 and with his back to the wall, he slowly began to take flight.

The turning point came when he finally secured his first break in the fourth game of the third set.

When the subsequent struggle to consolidate was ultimately successful it sounded a message as loud and clear as the Brazilian chants surging around him that he wasn’t about to capitulate.

“I changed a little bit my game,” Fonseca said. “I think going for the second serve returns inside the court to put a little bit more pressure and going more aggressive, which in the beginning I was trying to be more solid.

“I think he played really good in the first two sets. It was tough for me. I was not playing good, and he was just destroying me.”

Following quarterfinal runs in Monte-Carlo and Munich, there were concerns a wrist injury would impede the Brazilian’s bid for back-to-back third rounds at Roland-Garros and while he struggled to match his opponent’s venom in attack through the opening two sets, he was beginning to hit his marks at will.

Despite only claiming 59 per cent of first-serve points in the third set to the Croatian’s 83 per cent, he snared it after a searching 51 minutes to stay in the hunt and plant the first seeds of doubt in the 2023 junior champion’s mind.

Heaving support from the Brazilian faithful in such close confines at such a pivotal moment was tantamount to an extra spring in the step and Fonseca took complete control in the final two sets, winning 73 per cent and 81 per cent of first-serve points respectively to Prizmic’s 55 per cent and 38 per cent.

There was never a need to serve it out. A love break on a tracer forehand deep into the corner was the exclamation mark on their first encounter, a three-hour, 30-minute harbinger of a rivalry for the future – two names undaunted by the prospect of taking it to the greats.

Still, he saw one key difference between his ilk and the likes of his next opponent.

“Sometimes it's not only about the technique, or the powerful shots, or the consistency, but it's also about the good maturity … I think I'm just going to enjoy it,” he said.

“I mean, being in Roland-Garros, third round, for me it's just a dream. I'm going to enjoy every moment playing against an idol, the GOAT of the sport.”