NEW YORK—A little more than half an hour into Serena Williams’ 6-1, 6-3, 60-minute demolition of Ekaterina Makarova on Friday afternoon, a cry came from a woman in the upper deck of Arthur Ashe Stadium:

"Slow down Serena," she pleaded, "I'm not going home yet!"

It was a classic case of one person saying what everyone else in the building was thinking. By that point, Serena was already ahead 6-1, 3-0 and didn’t appear to be in the mood to slow down for anyone—even for 15,000 paying customers who were staring at a very early trip back to the parking lot. Who could blame her? When you’re playing this well, you want to see the next ball coming toward you as soon as possible.

On most days, it's next-to-impossible to predict anything about a player’s performance from what they do in their warm-up, but that wasn’t the case with Serena on this afternoon. Something about the way she bobbed and weaved and smacked her first few backhands—with a deep knee bend, a loud wallop at contact, and a full follow-through—caught my eye and made me keep watching her. The way she was hitting the ball looked and felt right. Makarova could feel it as soon as the points began. Even though she had played Serena five times before, it came as an unpleasant shock.

“Today she was so aggressive,” Makarova said. “I don’t know, maybe I didn’t think that she will be that aggressive. Like she’s coming, you know, so early, so sometimes I was too late because she was too fast.”

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From first point to last, Serena got to the ball quickly and stayed down through her strokes, just the way the textbook teaches. She didn’t overhit, and she didn't pull off the ball too soon. Serena played with depth and pace, but without going for too much. And this power player was by far the more consistent one today—she won eight of the nine points that lasted nine shots or longer.

“I knew she’s such an aggressive player, and she handles things so well,” Williams said afterward of Makarova, when she was asked how she dialed herself in so thoroughly. “I needed to be focused.”

She focused well enough, in fact, that her opponent disappeared from the picture. Makarova said she wasn’t that far off her game, but it didn’t matter. Serena finished with 24 winners; Makarova, who is a shot-maker against most other opponents, finished with six.

“I was pretty ready for it,” Makarova claimed. “I felt good. I felt physically good. Technically, the ball was sitting good on the racquet. But she’s No. 1, so of course she’s like, I don’t know, more ready for these matches.”

“I think she’s just born for tennis, you know,” Makarova continued. “Kind of [like] Federer, I think. She’s just doing everything well. That’s why she’s still playing. I think she’s enjoying all this atmosphere.”

What was interesting was that Serena herself had no idea whether she had been more aggressive than normal or not.

“To be honest, I don’t see it,” said Serena, “I don’t see myself. Like I hear you and I hear my coach and I hear—I have to watch [the tape of the match]. I didn’t see myself being that...coming to the net and being so aggressive.”

Maybe that’s the mark of being in the fabled Zone: You don’t feel like you’re trying harder than normal, or making any special efforts. You’re able to play within yourself rather than having to go outside yourself. And that’s how Serena looked today.

Yet the perfectionist, naturally, wasn’t satisfied with near perfection. Serena wasn’t happy with her slow start in her last match, against Flavia Pennetta, so she guarded against that today. In the final, it seems she’ll be tending to another part of her game.

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After her handshake with Makarova, Serena walked to the sidelines and prepared to be interviewed by Mary Jo Fernandez for ESPN. On her way out to the middle of the court, she glanced toward the Jumbotron above the court. At that moment, the match statistics were flashing on the screen. She hesitated a bit to have a look. One stat that may have stuck with her was her first-serve percentage, which was a pedestrian 60. She said wasn’t happy with that, but that may not necessarily be a bad thing come Sunday.

“I think I served better in my quarterfinal,” Serena said. “With that being said, it’s good news knowing I could try to serve better for one more match.”

Still, there wasn’t much that Serena could be unhappy with today. She knows that form like this doesn’t come along in every Grand Slam semifinal, and that she needed to make the most of it while it lasted.

At 3-0 in the second set, after hearing the plea from the upper deck to “slow down,” Serena stepped back from the baseline and took a second to flip her hair back. The crowd laughed. Then she stepped back up and served an ace. It landed with a thud against the wall behind the court. No one told her to slow down again.