For instance, when Paes volleyed Bhupathi and himself to a break for a 4-3 lead in the second set, the two French twenty-somethings may have been resolving to hold separate press conferences announcing they would not play as a doubles pair ever again.

And when Monfils mis-hit his return in the very next game, and chanted “la-la-la-la-la”, it may have been the last straw for Monsieur Simon. His patience may just have worn thin enough for him to seethe at his partner’s under-performance.

In actual fact, the two Frenchmen kept up quite a cheerful game against the obviously better doubles pair. At the Olympic Green Tennis Centre, where an air of festivity blew with the cool evening breeze, with spectators threading their way in and out of matches, Paes and Bhupathi came to the tie seeded seventh. They were expected to win, and they did.

But it will be their burden, a consequence of their actions and words, that excessive meaning will be read into every interaction, every glance that passes between them.

And during the 57-minute match (6-3, 6-3), it was just too easy to perceive inordinate intensity into their game. The match was clearly theirs from the start, the Frenchmen just too unable to cope, especially against Paes’s volleys and Bhupathi’s aggression. The real action was always confined to India’s side of the net.

They were polite, they walked each other across the court. There was a matey exchange each time they signalled each other to decide upon a set play. And when the break in the second set came, there was the chest thump.

Afterlife to dream run?

But if there was an edginess to be perceived, Paes provided odd confirmation at match’s end. “I have been asked if we refound our magic,” he said. “But we never lost it. The challenge is to produce it every day.” The next round, he said in the course of a remarkably hospitable walkabout to greet everyone in the stands, is the real hurdle. If they clear that, the rest of the road to medal contention is much clearer.

Paes-Bhupathi (or Lee-Hesh as they were called in more cordial times) have been an Olympic medal hope for India for a long time now. In Athens, that chance was dashed in a long bronze medal play-off. In Beijing the medal will not be easy.

But its quest, if it’s sufficiently sustained, could yield for Paes-Bhupathi a necessary afterlife to that dream run of 1999, when they reached all four Grand Slam finals and won two. Doubles is a curious game. Nobody should have a partner forced on him. Libertarians will wonder if it was pressure on them to partner each other that forced yet another messy exchange before the Olympics. But equally, at the Olympics, individual choice is mostly subsumed under team identity. Olympians do not make demands based on whims.

Doubles, significantly, endure when they hunt in pairs long enough. Paes and Bhupathi did not allow themselves enough time and mutual courtesy to do that. Now, producing that old magic, if not taking it for granted, each day may just be enough compensation to make up for lost time and unnecessarily ugly words.