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Days at tennis tournaments can be so long … that you can’t even buy a beer in the state of California by the time they finish playing.

The night session began late. And then top-seeded Dinara Safina and 19-year-old Victoria Azarenka played three sets.

The last match, involving top-seeded Rafael Nadal and David Nalbandian, didn’t begin until 11:15 p.m.

And then it went three sets and included a massive rally by Nadal. They didn’t finish playing until 2:02 a.m., with about 1,000 people left in the stadium and only a handful of reporters still on site.

It was fun, in an odd way. Thing is, if it’s gonna run late, why not run really late? Why not play all night? And they almost did. I wouldn’t want to do this, day after day — I was back at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, today, less than nine hours after I left it.

Here is the event story I filed just before 3 a.m.:

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — The gulf between the best tennis player in the world and someone who only aspires to the title was never more apparent than in the five tension-fraught hours that straddled midnight Wednesday in the California desert.

Rafael Nadal fought off five match points against an opponent who was on the verge of becoming his almost inexplicable nemesis, digging out of a 3-6, 3-5 hole to defeat David Nalbandian in the fourth round of the men’s singles competition early Thursday morning at the BNP Paribas Open.

Dinara Safina, up a set and needing only to finish off 19-year-old Victoria Azarenka and follow up with one more victory to take the No. 1 ranking from the absent Serena Williams, dissolved in a puddle of self-doubt and lost in the quarterfinals late Wednesday night at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.

Nadal is No. 1 in men’s tennis, and reinforced it in his gritty, 3-6, 7-6 (5), 6-0 victory over Nalbandian, from whom he had not taken a set in two previous encounters. An accomplishment that concluded at 2:02 a.m. and followed directly after Safina fell apart against a woman she overwhelmed in their three previous matches.

Not even Roger Federer defeats Nadal these days, but Nalbandian owned 6-4, 6-0 and 6-1, 6-2 victories over him from 2007, and when he took the first set behind bold and brilliant shot-making and surged to a 5-3 lead in the second, the tennis world was primed to spend a few days trying to parse the Argentine’s mastery of the Spaniard. But Nadal saved four match points on his serve, and added a fifth save in the next game. Nalbandian recovered to force a tiebreaker, and rallied to 6-5 before Nadal closed out the set with a service winner that brought the remnants of the crowd to life.

“I had a lot of luck,” Nadal suggested.

Safina’s collapse was painful to watch. She sprayed unforced errors all over the stadium court, racking up 56 to Azerenka’s 32. “I just gave all into her hands,” Safina conceded.

The defeat short-circuited Safina’s attempt to join her brother and hero, Marat Safin, as a world No. 1; they would have been the first brother and sister to be top-ranked in tennis history. Safin was No. 1 on the men’s side in November of 2000.

“I play like this, it definitely will never come,” Safina said of the top ranking. The Moscow native added, “It’s sad, because I’m practicing good, playing good, and suddenly I come to the match and I’m completely different player playing. In the next tournament I just want to play my game and play like I’ve been playing in the last year. I’m playing defensive, and it’s not me. I just want to play aggressive. That’s all.”

The top-seeded Safina’s path to No. 1 seemed smooth in a tournament going off without Serena and Venus Williams, ranked Nos. 1 and 5 in the world, and with second-seeded Jelena Jankovic and third-seeded Elena Dementieva eliminated early. But Safina was not sharp in her three victories, even if they came in straight sets. “I was struggling with every player that I’m playing,” she said. “With everyone who I played they were either serving for the set or had set points. I mean, I have to finally start playing my game because I’m not playing it.”

Safina had made a dramatic climb in the rankings, rising from No. 17 in May to the verge of No. 1 in March, in part by making the final of the 2008 French Open and the Australian Open in January, when she lost to Serena Williams.

Azarenka, a native of Belarus who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., said she was inspired by Nadal. And this was just as Nadal’s match was getting under way. “The image I had in my head there was actually Nadal, the way he plays all the time. No matter what, he fights. You can see it’s his mentality. For me, it is the best mentality anybody ever had. So I was just trying to fight as good as him, and it was pretty good for me.”

The tournament, one of only two, aside from the four Grand Slam events, that runs two weeks and features both men and women, is splitting into two tournaments of diverging interest. A women’s competition filled with young and little-known teens such as Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova of Russia, who meet in the quarterfinals Thursday, and Azarenka. The only players left in the tournament with any appreciable history are fourth-seeded Vera Zvonareva, who gets Azarenka in one semifinal, and defending champion and No. 5 seed Ana Ivanovic of Serbia, who faces Sybille Bammer.

Meantime, the men’s quarterfinals boast the top four seeds, Nadal, Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, as well as No. 6 Juan Martin del Potro, No. 7 Andy Roddick and No. 10 Fernando Verdasco of Spain.