MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Be brave.

Go for it.

Those were the mantras Madison Keys turned to as she confronted the most significant points of her tennis career, trapped in the cauldron of a third set that was tied at 5-all, 30-all in the Australian Open final against two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka on Saturday.

No reason to be anything but aggressive now, Keys thought. No reason to try to wish there weren’t nerves accompanying the moment. No reason to worry — as the American long did along the journey from prodigy at age 12 to major champion less than a month before her 30th birthday — about what would happen if things didn’t quite work out.

“I just kept saying, ‘Be brave.’ And, ‘Go for it.’ I kind of just kept repeating that. That was really my goal for the day — to just be proud, no matter a win or a loss,” Keys said in an interview with The Associated Press after winning her first Grand Slam title with a 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 victory over the No. 1-ranked Sabalenka in Rod Laver Arena.

“I went after it, every single point. And if I missed it and I just didn’t execute, I could live with that. I didn’t want to have any sort of regret that I was passive and I missed. (Then) it could have been something where I thought: ‘I should have done something else,’” Keys said, her hands clasped as she recalled what transpired about two hours earlier. “So I kind of just kept saying that, over and over.”

She spread the credit for her achievement. To the team around her, including Bjorn Fratangelo, a former player who has been her partner for years, her coach since mid-2023 and her husband since November. To her therapist, with whom she spoke or texted frequently over the past two weeks. To her friends on tour who lifted her up when she needed it.

They all believed in Keys, she said, and now, lately, she believed in herself, too.

At her post-match news conference, Keys discussed at length the ways in which her outlook changed.

She used to be concerned about never living up to the hype that accompanied her from before she was even a teen and only increased when she made her first appearance in a Grand Slam semifinal at Melbourne Park at age 19 (she lost to Serena Williams). She used to think nothing about her tennis career would matter if she never managed to claim a major trophy. She used to assume the sport’s best never felt jitters like those hampering her during her first Grand Slam final at the U.S. Open at age 22 ( she lost to Sloane Stephens ).

Eventually, Keys let all of that go. It was OK not to obsess over others’ opinions. It was OK if she never won a Slam. It was OK to face the nerves, because, after all, that’s how the greats succeed — they feel discomfort but play through it.

“I was nervous my entire career. So is Novak (Djokovic). So was Roger (Federer). Everybody has been,” Fratangelo, a former player who looked on with reddened eyes as Keys accepted her trophy, said during the tournament. “It’s just how you deal with it. And she’s starting to deal with it in a better way.”

That was the case throughout her run, which featured five three-setters and four victories over top-10 seeds (No. 1 Sabalenka, No. 2 Iga Swiatek, No. 6 Elena Rybakina and No. 10 Danielle Collins ), including a trio of major champs (Sabalenka, Swiatek, Rybakina). No woman had defeated the top two players in the WTA rankings during one major since 2009.

Swiatek used the word “brave” to describe the ways Keys played while saving a match point before coming through in their final-set tiebreaker.

“To do it that way,” Keys said at her news conference, “I think, really, I thought to myself after the match that I can absolutely win on Saturday.”

She was so good at the start and down the stretch against Sabalenka.

From 5-all, 30-all, Keys claimed six of the last eight points. She hammered first-strike forehand winners on consecutive points to hold serve, then earned the lone break of the third set, closing it out with — fittingly — yet another forehand winner.

“If she can play consistently like that, I mean, it’s not much you can do,” Sabalenka said.

Keys was brave.

She went for it.

“My first semifinal here feels like it was forever ago. I mean, I honestly felt like I was a different person then. But I think that that kind of happens when so many things have happened throughout the past decade,” Keys told the AP. “It’s just kind of all accumulated to get to the point where I was finally able to just go out and play some really good tennis and walk away with a Grand Slam.”

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Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis writer since 2002. Find his stories here: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich. More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis

In the final hours of his term, President Joe Biden negotiated a prisoner exchange with the Taliban that released U.S. citizens Ryan Corbett and William Wallace McKenty from Taliban custody. 

Not included in the deal, however, were U.S. citizens George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi.

On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that he was “just hearing” of the detentions of additional Americans by the Taliban. 

“If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on Bin Laden,” Rubio wrote.

2 AMERICANS RELEASED IN EXCHANGE FOR TALIBAN PRISONER

Dennis Fitzpatrick, who is coordinating efforts outside the U.S. government for Glezmann’s release, claimed Glezmann was “never a serious priority for the Biden White House.” 

“President Biden and [former National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan decided to leave George Glezmann in Kabul for no good reason,” Fitzpatrick told Fox News Digital. “We are confident that President Trump’s clear-eyed leadership will secure George’s release to his family.”

Fitzpatrick added that 66-year-old Glezmann is “a totally innocent man” who was “a hard-working, blue-collar airline mechanic before he was wrongfully detained. He doesn’t deserve to be used as a pawn.”

Glezmann has been in detention since Dec. 5, 2022, when he was traveling to Afghanistan to “explore the cultural landscape and rich history of the country” according to a Senate resolution from July 2024 calling for his immediate release. 

The resolution states that Glezmann’s mental and physical condition were deteriorating as a result of his detention in a nine-foot square underground cell. He has only been allowed limited calls to family and has experienced “facial tumors, hypertension, severe malnutrition, and other medical conditions” as a result of his detention.

Former President Joe Biden at the White House  (Anna Moneymaker)

While the Taliban admit to holding Glezmann in custody, they insist they do not hold Mahmood Habibi. 

TALIBAN DISMISS DISCRIMINATION ACCUSATIONS AS ‘ABSURD’ DESPITE BANNING WOMEN FROM THE PUBLIC IN AFGHANISTAN

Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks after being sworn in by Vice President JD Vance in the Vice Presidential Ceremonial Office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus Tuesday, in Washington, D.C.  (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Habibi’s brother Ahmad told Fox News Digital the family “know[s] that my brother is still in Taliban custody. I can’t share too much about that because we don’t want to put him or others at risk. But anyone accepting the Taliban’s hollow suggestions that they do not have him is falling for their lies.

“We have multiple witnesses to his arrest by the [General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI)]. We have multiple witnesses who were held with him at GDI headquarters. The Taliban has always claimed they don’t have him and don’t know who he is. How do they explain the obvious contradictions to this?”

Ahmad also claimed the family “know[s] that the U.S. government has technical evidence that Mahmood was in GDI custody long after his arrest.” 

He alleges the Biden National Security Council “micromanaged the State Department’s effort to secure my brother’s release” and “blocked [the State Department] from using the data in their discussions with the Taliban, even though we told them that it would have directly confronted the Taliban’s claims that they never heard of my brother.” 

TOP GENERAL IN FIGHT AGAINST THE TALIBAN SAYS AFGHANISTAN HAS ONCE AGAIN BECOME A ‘CRUCIBLE OF TERRORISM’ 

Neither the State Department nor the National Security Council responded to Fox News Digital’s requests for confirmation of Ahmad’s claims.

Fox News Digital also reached out to Taliban spokespersons Zabihullah Mujahid and Suhail Shaheen about Habibi’s detention and asked Mujahid what happened to Habibi after he was arrested by the GDI. Mujahid did not respond. Shaheen directed Fox News Digital to reach out to the GDI and claimed no knowledge of the situation.  

The Taliban have long sought the release of Guantanamo Bay detainee and al Qaeda facilitator Muhammad Rahim in exchange for the Americans they admitted were in their prisons. Ahmad Habibi told CBS News President Biden assured him in a Jan. 12 phone call that the U.S. would not release Rahim unless the Taliban released Habibi.

Taliban fighters in Kabul, Afghanistan (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Former Principal Deputy Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Hugh Dugan told Fox News Digital the Trump administration could pursue multiple “lines of effort” to secure the release of Glezmann and Habibi. 

Dugan said this could involve “outright rescue by the military” at one level or continued “subtle diplomacy in the background.”  

Dugan said he recognized that “to say we’re doing everything we can … is not satisfying to a family member, frankly, or anybody, and they want to hear that you’re continuing to identify what might have eluded us all along, or that there’s a crack in the horizon that’s opening. 

“And we need to realize that that might be another step in our path to recovery and a line of effort has to be amended to accommodate new realities at any given moment.”

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the US has not stopped military aid to Ukraine after the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he would pause foreign aid grants for 90 days.

Zelenskyy did not clarify whether humanitarian aid had been paused but Ukraine relies on the US for around 40% of its military needs.

“I am focused on military aid; it has not been stopped, thank God,” he said at a press conference in Kyiv.

The future of US aid to Ukraine remains uncertain as President Donald Trump begins his second term in office.

The American leader has repeatedly said he wouldn’t have allowed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to start if he had been in office, although he was president as fighting grew in the east of the country between Kyiv’s forces and separatists aligned with Moscow, ahead of Putin sending in tens of thousands of troops in 2022.

On Thursday, Trump told Fox News that Zelenskyy should have made a deal with Putin to avoid the conflict.

A day earlier, Trump also threatened to impose stiff tariffs and sanctions on Russia if an agreement isn’t reached to end the fighting in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy said he had enjoyed “good meetings and conversations with President Trump” and that he believed the US leader would succeed in his desire to end the war.

“This can only be done with Ukraine and otherwise it simply will not work because Russia does not want to end the war and Ukraine does,” Zelenskyy said.

Eastern offensive

With Trump stressing the need to quickly broker a peace deal, both Moscow and Kyiv are seeking battlefield successes to strengthen their negotiating positions ahead of any prospective talks. 

For the past year, Russian forces have been waging an intense campaign to punch holes in Ukraine’s defences in the Donetsk region to weaken Kyiv’s grip on the eastern parts of the country.

The sustained and costly offensive has compelled Kyiv to give up a series of towns, villages and hamlets.

Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed on Friday that Russian troops had fought their way into the centre of the strategically important eastern of Velyka Novosilka, although it was not possible to independently confirm the claim.

Elsewhere, three civilians were killed on Saturday in shelling in the Russian-occupied area of Ukraine’s Kherson region, the Moscow-installed Governor Vladimir Saldo said.

He urged the residents of Oleshky, which sits close to the frontline in southern Ukraine, to stay in their homes or in bomb shelters.

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Russia also attacked Ukraine with two missiles and 61 Shahed drones overnight into Saturday.

Ukrainian air defences shot down both missiles and 46 drones, a statement from the air force said. Another 15 drones failed to reach targets due to Ukrainian countermeasures.