When the week began, Stacey Allaster was 40 years young and aging by the moment.

Or, maybe by the hour.

Have you ever done something completely right and have it turn out so very wrong?

The Rogers AT&T Cup is her baby, her compulsion for 365 days a year, the Canadian Open with a name sold away for sponsorship. And this year, her baby was crying, struck by the kind of tennis diseases she had no control over.

Knee trouble. Back trouble. Rib trouble. Fear of SARS. You name it, she had to deal with it. And that was before a match even was played.

Then came more troubles.

And when the week ended, after what -- withdrawals, rain, the blackout to end all blackouts, No. 1 seed Kim Clijsters losing, too many Russians no one has ever heard of winning, unbearable heat and an absolute dog of a final -- Allaster was still 40 years of ago, just no longer young

"How many years did you age this week?'' Allaster, the tournament director, was asked.

'How does it look?" she answered smiling.

At least she could laugh about it. The alternative would have some of us in tears and not the tears of joy that were evident in Allaster's eyes late yesterday afternoon.

They advertised Serena Williams was coming, and she opted for surgery rather than Toronto.

They advertised Monica Seles and injuries kept her away. They advertised Clijsters and she was gone about as quickly as you could say Lina Krasnoroutskaya, whose name was so long, and time in yesterday's final was so short, that you couldn't fit all the letters on the scoreboard.

Even the little breaks didn't go Allaster's way. On Tuesday night, little-known Canadian Marie-Eve Pelletier led 5-2 in the third set against little-known Mashona Washington when the match foreshadowed what was to come later in the week.

Unofficially, the lights went out on Pelletier two days earlier than they went out on the eastern seaboard. Not only couldn't the tournament give you the Williams sisters (or the Andrews sisters for that matter), but it couldn't provide even a few days of compelling Canadian stuff.

A good old Canadian win can buy a few days of happy news amidst all the bad. This week, it couldn't even buy that much.

Justine Henin-Hardenne won the tournament in about a minute and a half and then apologized for how she played.

"I probably didn't play my best," she said.

Good thing for that. The final lasted all of 54 minutes. Had she been on her game, it might have been over in about half that time.

The memories of this event at the National Tennis Centre will be more of what was in the past then of the past week. To get to the finals, Henin had to defeat the Russian national team -- Elena Dementieva, Elena Bovina and Nadia Petrova -- before romping over Krasnoroutskaya yesterday afternoon.

Said Krasnoroutskaya, wrapping up her day and the week eloquently in broken English: "My head was a little bit going around.''

How do you think the rest of us felt?

In no particular order, Pelletier lost after leading; Clijsters was eliminated; defending champion Amelie Mauresmo was eliminated and the lights went out in Toronto, Detroit, New York and Cleveland.

"At first, the players didn't understand," said Allaster, who has a reputation for running the best tournament on the circuit. Tennis players, in case you missed it, are not the most understanding of people. They don't understand when a hot buffet turns cold. They don't understand when their limo is 30 seconds late.

"We told them not to leave. We had a generator here and could take care of them," Allaster said. "Under the circumstances, they were very understanding."

So were the fans, more of them here than the event truly deserves -- 140,007 in all. In a town where football and baseball barely sell any more, this tennis tournament thrives, even on a week as horrible as this one.

At least that gave Stacey Allaster something to smile about. After a week like this, she needed something.