As Madison Keys strode across Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday afternoon, she led with her grin. It’s a toothy one, and an irrepressible one when she’s happy. At this moment she was very happy. A few seconds earlier, Keys—age just 19, rank just 35—had finished a post-match interview after the biggest win of her career, a 6-3 4-6, 6-4 comeback over Venus Williams that put her into her first Grand Slam semifinal.

Yet this modest Midwesterner could have been forgiven if her grin got a little smaller, and her eyes a little wider, at the next few words she heard.

“There goes the future of women’s tennis!” boomed the woman who had just interviewed Keys, former Aussie pro Rennae Stubbs.

As they say: No pressure.

For now, though, the future is just what it says it is. Keys is all about the present; over the last 10 days in Melbourne, her career has been turned upside-down. Or, I should say, right-side-up: After three years of stops and starts, of flying high one day and floundering the next, Keys has put together the best sustained run of her young life. It’s rare, in the age of 32 seeds, for a player outside of that group to go this deep at a major, and Keys has done it by knocking off two multi-Slam champs, Williams and Petra Kvitova, along the way. But for many of us who have been following this powerful athlete’s progress over the last five years, Keys’s success doesn’t come as a shock; it's right on time.

“I mean, it definitely feels amazing,” Keys said afterward, sounding all of her 19 years. “It’s one of those things where you want to feel this way all the time. I mean, I’ve had some good wins; I’ve had some bad losses. That’s my goal for the year, just being more consistent. Even playing badly, not being horrible.”

“Not being horrible”: That might sound like the ultimate in low expectations, but what Keys really means is that she wants to be more professional. With that in mind, this off-season she hired Lindsay Davenport and her husband, Jon Leach, as her co-coaches. The choice made sense: As a former No. 1, Davenport qualifies as a “super coach,” someone who has been there, and someone who can inspire. At the same time, Davenport’s down-to-earth personality would also seem to be a match for Keys’. As Serena Williams said, they're both "easygoing people."

“This off-season has been great, and it’s obviously working,” Keys said with a slight eye-roll, as if she couldn’t quite believe how well it has been working.

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The scores were close, but Keys did something we’re not used to seeing today: She dominated the rallies against one of the Williams sisters. The story of this year’s women’s Aussie Open has been power: Serve speeds are up, and young players like Elina Svitolina, Garbine Muguruza, and Camila Giorgi have surprised Venus and Serena—the original pace-makers—by smacking the ball past them from anywhere on the court. But it took Keys, the biggest hitter of all—she has clocked a 75-M.P.H. forehand in Oz—to finally send one of the sisters packing. Keys led Venus in winners, 34 to 10, and broke her serve seven times.

In the past, Keys could look like a slugger rather than a player, and she often appeared to be winging it, without any plan, from shot to shot. In Melbourne, her swings have had purpose, and few have felt rushed or indecisive. By most accounts, Davenport and Leach have tried to get Keys to aim a little farther inside the lines, which makes sense; even without risking everything, she can still rifle the ball past her opponents. Against Venus, Keys tried to do damage with each shot, without necessarily trying to hit outright winners. She even impressed with her touch volleys today. Like another semifinalist with a new coach, Tomas Berdych, Keys’ shot selection has been the most obvious improvement under her new regime.

“I think I’ve just kind of figured it out a little more,” said Keys, who won this match despite going down a break in the third and aggravating the left thigh injury that put her out of Wimbledon last year. “Just been more consistent and playing better.”

There’s much more for Keys to learn; she still struggles to take the little steps she needs to get up to the ball on her ground strokes. And those 34 winners came with 45 errors. But she certainly had Venus’s serve figured out by the end. Down 3-4 in the third, Keys broke her with three straight forehand winners, and she broke her again at 5-4 with two more forehand winners. That’s the work of a slugger and a player, and it’s that combination that has traditionally won major titles on the women’s side. Serena, Maria, Vika, Petra, Li Na all have weapons, all create their own winners, and all won more than one Slam in the last four years. Two of this tournament’s losing quarterfinalists, Genie Bouchard and Simona Halep, each of whom had a breakout 2014, didn’t show off that same kind of firepower in Australia.

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So is Keys, as Stubbsy said, “the future of women’s tennis”? Maybe not “the future,” but “a future” sounds plausible at the moment. She didn’t have the world’s toughest draw here, and Sloane Stephens was a semifinalist in Melbourne at the same age two years ago and has struggled mightily since. But Keys has a good attitude and a big game, and those things will never go out of style in pro tennis.

What does Venus Williams, the woman who inspired Keys to pick up the game 15 years ago, think about what’s ahead for her accidental protégé?

“Sky’s the limit,” Venus said. She wasn’t talking specifically about Keys, of course; Venus, through her own experience, is a big believer that anyone can do anything they set their mind to do. “The sky’s the limit for her and everyone out there.”

Venus's words might just put a grin on Madison's face. Sounds like she picked the right woman to follow.