Roger Federer and Pete Sampras rather easily sold 19,000 tickets to this evening’s exhibition at Madison Square Garden, many of them for $1,000. If you ask most people who are going, or who plan to watch it on television or online (the Tennis Channel will broadcast the match and the United States Tennis Association will stream it at USTA.com), why they are interested, they’ll call this event a clash of all-time greats, a battle between a legend with 14 major titles (Sampras) and his heir apparent (Federer has collected 12 majors and hopes for many more). Or they’ll say they want to see a true serve-and-volleyer in action again and lament that no one practices that artful brand of tennis anymore. A few might say that they hope this match will inspire Sampras, who won an exhibition match against Federer last fall in Asia, to make a comeback.

I don’t care much for any of those reasons. For one, Sampras is the only all-time great playing tonight, as “all-time great” essentially means, “retired.” The 36-year-old American is 10 years older than Federer, and although Federer may one day be remembered as the best tennis player ever, right now he is in the prime of his career (and thankfully recovering from a bout with mononucleosis). Even if Sampras’s great serve keeps the match close, this is essentially an unfair contest, not a clash of titans.

As for serving and volleying, I don’t miss the days when everyone did it, but I’ll admit it would be nice to see it more often — as long as everyone else who complains about its passing admits two things: one, that it does happen sometimes (Federer uses it here and there and I watched Rafael Nadal try it a dozen times in Dubai this week, before he lost to Andy Roddick), and two, that when Sampras was dominating the game, they complained nothing could be more boring than the serve-and-volley. I have no doubt that Sampras, if 10 years younger, could have used this style effectively today, or that Federer could have solved it if he faced it regularly (Lleyton Hewitt and Marat Safin did, and don’t forget that Federer won the only tournament match he played against Sampras, at Wimbledon in 2001).

Lastly, Sampras will not return to professional tennis, because he knows that, no matter how well he plays on any given day, it’s the next day that matters. He’s not going to hold up in best-of-three-set matches over the course of a tournament, never mind best-of-five. In his most recent exhibition, Sampras lost to Todd Martin — need I say more?

What draws me to this exhibition, and the reason I think so many in New York City are drawn to it, can be summed up in one word: nostalgia. It’s been seven years since professional tennis was played at the Garden, and we now realize what we’ve been missing.

It’s strange that this match, of all the possible tennis matches Madison Square Garden might have hosted since 2001, is the one to put the venue back on the tennis map. Sampras was never a New York favorite. Sure, he was respected and admired, but he was never treated like a rock star by fans at the U.S. Open, as Andre Agassi was in his early years and even more so as he inched closer to retirement. Federer isn’t from America and his agent recently said the world no. 1, who has won the U.S. Open four straight years, is concentrating more on furthering his image in the Middle East (he lives a few months a year in Dubai) and in Asia than in the United States, where his marketing power seems to have peaked. Every American tennis fans knows Federer, but he’s not particularly well known outside of that small group and that’s not likely to change. Yet somehow this match has become something more than an exhibition, something that doesn’t need the promise of arguments, trash talking, or contested line calls to sell tickets.

New York City was once the tennis capital of the world: It owned the U.S. Open and the year-end championships for the top men and women. Those days are gone and they are not going to return — the business of tennis has changed too much and the game has made inroads into too many places for New York to receive that much attention again (which is a good thing for the sport as a whole, if not the sport in America). Still, this match reminds us of that past, and it just might make other matches like this one — exhibitions or perhaps a small tournament willing to attract top players with handsome appearance fees — possible. I wouldn’t bank on it, but at least for one night tennis in New York City, in late winter, will be alive and well.

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Jimmy Connors is gone; Andy Roddick is back. In Dubai this week, Roddick announced that he and Connors had parted company, and then he played a better tournament than he had in his 18 months with Connors as a coach. The American defeated world no. 2 Rafael Nadal and world no. 3 Novak Djokovic for his second title of the season. He defeated Feliciano Lòpez in the final, 6–7(8), 6–4, 6–2.

In women’s tennis, Serena Williams won her first title in nearly a year, defeating Patty Schnyder 7–5, 6–3 in Bangalore, India. In the semifinals, Serena defeated her sister Venus in their first match against each other since the 2005 U.S. Open.

Mr. Perrotta is a senior editor at Tennis Magazine. He can be reached at tperrotta@tennismagazine.com.