Stan Wawrinka’s clay-court career is officially over. It ended the way most of his best chapters have: in front of a crowd that adored him. The three-time Grand Slam champion, now 41 and playing out his farewell season, lost his final tour-level match on the surface in the first round of the Millennium Estoril Open. The score-line barely mattered once the match was done.

“The love from the people is the most important thing,” an emotional Wawrinka said after the match. He added that the number of kids he saw in the crowd stood out to him most of all.

The venue was packed for the occasion, and the applause for “Stan the Man” kept going well after his three-set loss to Roman Andres Burruchaga, an opponent 17 years his junior.

The match itself nearly delivered a storybook ending. Wawrinka dropped the first set 6-4, then leveled things by winning the second 6-4 himself, still finding the angles that made his clay game so hard to solve. In the decider, he saved three match points and made Burruchaga fight for every game before finally going down 6-3, closing out a 202-124 career record on the surface.

That kind of fight has defined Wawrinka’s relationship with clay for over a decade. He won the Monte-Carlo Masters in 2014 and his most cherished title, the French Open, a year later, both built on the same one-handed backhand that Estoril fans came out to see one last time. He was a former Estoril champion himself too, winning the old Portugal Open in Oeiras back in 2013, one of seven clay-court titles from fourteen finals.

Clay is also where Wawrinka built the foundation for something even bigger: a habit of beating the best players of his generation whenever a Grand Slam title was on the line.

Stan Wawrinka Gave His Best Against the Greatest Players of His Time

Wawrinka won each of his three majors by beating at least one member of the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic trio, often more than one across the same fortnight. At the 2014 Australian Open, his breakthrough major, he beat both Djokovic in the final to lift the trophy.

The following year at Roland Garros, he beat his own compatriot, Federer, in the quarterfinals before outlasting Djokovic in the final, denying the Serb the career Grand Slam he was chasing that day.

Wawrinka completed the set at the 2016 US Open. He saved a match point against Dan Evans early in the tournament, then beat Djokovic again in the final for his third and last major title.

Titles aside, it’s the connection with fans that has defined this farewell season. Show courts were packed for his final Australian Open appearance in January, and Gstaad organizers marked his visit with a gift tied to his French Open win, the same kind of reception Estoril just gave him.

Wawrinka has one stop left on his farewell tour: the Swiss Indoors in Basel this October, his home event, where he’s set to end his career in front of the crowd that has followed him longest.