Winners get their due. But losers are wonderfully human.

She couldn’t win a single game.

In the third round of the French Open on Saturday, Wang Xinyu of China had to believe there was at least a chance she could beat the reigning women’s singles champion and top seed Iga Swiatek. After all, Wang is no slouch. She’s a rock-hard 21-year-old who hit a career-high ranking of 59th in the world in April, and she can put up a viable battle against the very best.

But she lost, and it was as ugly as can be: 6-0, 6-0 – in tennis terms, a dreaded double bagel. The game didn’t last much longer than the warm-up.

I say there is glory in that kind of imperfection.

Long live the weak. The weary and exhausted, the warriors and the stragglers. The athletes who lose miserably suffer in public.

Long live the defeated in sport.

We’ve seen a lot of them this past week and we’ll be seeing more soon.

Of course, this doesn’t just happen on the slippery gravel of the French Open.

The NBA and NHL playoffs have finally reached their finals. College softball, which is rapidly growing in popularity, is in the mix with the NCAA Division I championships. The Oklahoma Sooners are aiming for a third straight title – and to add to their Division I record of 51 straight wins – after beating Stanford in an extra innings semifinal on Monday. Let’s have some sympathy for the Sooner’s pack of victims.

Most of the story will focus on the winners of these championships. That is only natural. The world’s greatest athletes stretch and bend the limits of human potential. The best of the best even seem to be able to control time. No wonder we see them perform with awe that feels existential. They have become divine in our world.

That is fine and understandable, but give me the tennis player who struggles with all his might to win even one game in a Grand Slam match. Give me the basketball star who makes crucial free throws and the goalie in hockey who slips and whizzes by the game-winning blow shot.

Give me nerves that relax when the pressure comes. I’m here for reflexes that aren’t what they used to be.

Why? Well, the victors always get their due. But to err, as we all know, is human – perfect and wonderful. And those who lose in so many different ways occupy the more recognizable corner of major sports.

It’s comforting to know that highly conditioned, highly coordinated, hard-working athletes can fatigue, cramp, collapse under pressure, struggle to get enough air, and suffer a stabbing defeat. When they fail, they become, if only briefly, more like the rest of us schmoes.

So we can take solace in the Boston Bruins, who racked up a record 65 wins in the regular season and promptly lost to the Florida Panthers in the first round of the NHL playoffs. High hopes for the Stanley Cup became dead weight. Who can tell? I know I can.

Speaking of Boston, in the NBA playoffs, the Celtics’ Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum fought back from a 3-0 hole to tie the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals. Then, in Game 7, with a history-making comeback in the game, they collectively laid a stink bomb, putting in performances that rank among the worst and weakest of their careers.

Ever stood on the edge of something great, only to fail – and fail hard, in public? Yeah me too, back to the fifth grade play where I forgot my lines, tripped on stage and nearly broke my nose. It wasn’t hard to feel sympathy for Brown and Tatum as they fired shot after shot, and Miami won by 19 points, with all those millions agreeing.

The red clay at Roland Garros – where no step is certain, no bounce can be counted on and every match can turn into a grueling marathon – offers the clearest possible window into the crushing truth of sport.

Players walk onto the fields looking like Parisian runway models, their skin bronzed, their fresh outfits pressed. Then, once the games get moving, reality sets in.

In the other Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the points often end in rapid succession. On the clay of Roland Garros, the points can stretch like a John Coltrane solo. They can go on and on, the pressure mounts, the pace builds crescendo.

In the most protracted and competitive matches, you often see pain – both mental and physical – descending on the players. Insecurity creeps in, and with it leanness. Muscles weaken and tremble. The fresh outfits – shoes, socks, shirts, wristbands, headbands, hats – cake with sweat and clods of clay.

Wang was not on the court long enough to suffer against Swiatek. But Gaël Monfils from France was. Monfils, a weathered 36-year-old veteran who played perhaps his last Grand Slam in front of a home crowd, won his first-round match despite trailing 4-0 in the fifth set. Along the way, he struggled past aching lungs and a storm of leg cramps. He dragged out the match but was so tired and sore that he was unable to come to court for his second round match two days later.

The march of time waits for no one.

A few days later, a much younger player, Italy’s Jannik Sinner – 21, seeded number 8 and rising rapidly – took on Daniel Altmaier, a journeyman number 79, at Suzanne Lenglen Court.

Sinner should have won without much effort.

He sniffed ahead early, but struggled. An hour passed. Altmaier caught up. Another hour passed. The match became a stalemate. Three hours became four hours. Sinner had two match points – and coughed up both. They entered a fifth set. Sinner fell behind and came back, conceding four match points, but winning them all.

And then…and then, at 5 hours and 26 minutes, Sinner saw a screaming serve fly past his outstretched racket for an ace. Game. set. Agreement. Final Score: 6-7 (0), 7-6 (7), 1-6, 7-6 (4), 7-5. The upset was the fifth-longest match in French Open history.

Sinner walked off the field messy and confused, his face betraying the self-doubt common to losers. In other words, he was beautifully human.