Madison Keys is okay with being the villain in Serena's summer

NEW YORK – A win against Serena this week guarantees a place in history. It means your name will be remembered more readily than some of the foreign players who have actually raised the trophy in Flushing Meadows. It means that 20 years from now, Serena’s droves of fans hear your name and say, “Ohhh, the one that beat Serena that year.”

Madison Keys is just fine with that. “She’s won four in a row and she’s going for the calendar year," Keys said Friday. "That’s great, but at the same time I want to win.”

“I’d be okay with beating her, yeah,” she said when asked what she thought of being remembered as the villain in this tale. She didn’t seem to completely understand the question. Of course she wants to win. But does she want the ire of Serena’s fans?

Plenty of women have beaten Serena in her career. Three even did it in Grand Slam championship matches. To beat Serena this week though, would be remarkable. No one has managed to outlast her in a Grand Slam match this year. Only two women have beaten her in smaller tournaments. As she marches closer to the U.S. Open final, the stakes are only higher. The villain would be stealing that much more from her, at least in the eyes of her fans.

Leading up to their third-round meeting, fellow American Bethanie Mattek-Sands said she was comfortable with the role. She actually thought it would be cool.

Mattek-Sands is one of Serena’s contemporaries, a 30-year-old who was playing in the main draw for the 13th time. She seemed to recognize that winning that match could define her, in a way that her steady but unspectacular career had not.

While Mattek-Sands is nearing the end of her career, Keys is just starting out. She’s 20 years old. Beating Serena would be the icing on the cake of Keys’s best year yet, but it would not be the final big moment. She plans to have many more of those.

Before Serena was the greatest player in history, she, too, was the villain in another champion’s tale.

“The 17-year-old Williams upset top-seeded Martina Hingis in Saturday’s U.S. Open final, dismantling the world’s top player with shocking ease,” Bonnie DeSimone wrote in the September 12, 1999 issue of the Chicago Tribune they day after Serena won her first U.S. Open. Referring to Serena as a player who’d had “little success in Grand Slam tournaments up to now,” DeSimone quoted the champion. “There comes a time when you have to stop caving… In the end I told myself, ‘You’re going to have to perform.’”

Finding a way to perform on Sunday could be the moment that propels Keys' career to the next level, too. And just as Serena was in 1999, Keys is more than capable of pulling off the upset.

She’s a fellow big-serving American who actually enters the match with better first-week stats than Serena. Her groundstrokes are on average 74 miles per hour - that’s seven miles per hour faster than Serena’s, the fastest among any women (and all but one man) in the main draw. Keys served 22 aces in the first week; Serena had 20. Both of their serves top 120 mph, with Serena taking the slight edge there. Keys has not dropped a set, Serena has dropped one.

Their only previous meeting was at this year’s Australian Open, where Serena prevailed 7-6, 6-2. Keys knows that she has a massive challenge in front of her. But like any rising star, winning these matches is how you move into the next tier.

“Her fight is something that I kind of want to emulate and try to get as good as,” Keys said.

She’ll see that fight first-hand on Sunday. Should she outlast it, Keys will go down as the villain in this Serena fairytale.

"Obviously since the draw came out that's kind of been the big talk, that it could happen," she said Friday. "For me to be able to put myself in that position is really big for me, so really just looking forward to it.

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Danielle Elliot is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Find her on Twitter and Facebook.