Sixteen years after Goran Ivanisevic's dramatic run to the 2001 title, the Croatian tennis public are beginning to imagine they might have another potential champion in Marin Cilic, who is into the semi-finals for the first time.
So far, Cilic's Wimbledon Fortnight has lacked the anarchic feel of Ivanisevic's wild card triumph. But who needs anarchy or romance when you have a game as mighty as Cilic's? There is nothing infantile about Baby Goran, a 28-year-old who is producing some of the most accomplished grass court tennis of his life, and who won a five-setter against Luxembourg's Gilles Muller to go through to play America's Sam Querrey on Friday for a place in the Wimbledon final.
There are plenty of differences between Ivanisevic and the player he used to coach. While there were three conflicting voices in Ivanisevic's head back in 2001 - Good Goran, Bad Goran and Emergency Goran - there appears to be just one in Cilic's: Solid, Dependable Marin. And while Ivanisevic was a wild card when he won, Cilic is the No.7 seed, so his progress has hardly come from nowhere.
And Cilic isn't reliant, as the superstitious Ivanisevic was, on watching the children's television programme Teletubbies every day after breakfast. He also hasn't been following Ivanisevic's example of eating the same three-course dinner at the same table of the same restaurant every evening.
What Cilic and Ivanisevic do have in common is a heavy serve that can do considerable damage on the lawns. If Gilles was Mullering the ball on No.1 Court, just as he had done when winning a 15-13 fifth set against Rafael Nadal in the previous round, then so was Cilic. Muller was back on the same rectangle of grass where he had beaten Nadal on Monday, in that fourth round classic lasting almost five hours. This was also a five-setter, but it was considerably shorter at three and a half hours, and the outcome was different, with Cilic progressing 3-6, 7-6(6), 7-5, 5-7, 6-1.
When Cilic and Querrey meet on Friday, don't expect it to be brief. When they played in the third round of the 2012 Championships, the Croatian won after five hours and 31 minutes.
Since Ivanisevic's time, there has been only one other Croatian semi-finalist at the All England Club, Mario Ancic in 2004, and he has just briefly reappeared on the scene as Novak Djokovic's assistant coach (though he spends most of his life working for an investment bank on Wall Street).
This was quite the breakthrough for Cilic, who had lost at this stage of The Championships for the past three summers, with defeats to Djokovic in 2014 and 2015 and to Roger Federer last year after holding match points. "This means a lot. This is an amazing achievement. I had got stuck in the quarter-finals for the last three years," said Cilic, who won his first Grand Slam title at the 2014 US Open.
To fully appreciate the national significance of Muller's progress at the All England Club, you had only to look at his player's guest-box above the scoreboard on No.1 Court, which contained both Luxembourg's Crown Prince Guillaume and Prime Minister Xavier Bettel. The equivalent for Andy Murray, which is hard to imagine, would be Prince Charles and Theresa May budging up next to Ivan Lendl.
Never before in the Open era had Luxembourg, a country better known for its tax breaks than its service breaks, had a Wimbledon quarter-finalist (though that's not particularly surprising, given that Muller is the only man from Luxembourg to have played at The Championships in modern times). What they don't have now, thanks to Cilic, is a first semi-finalist.
