Nick Kyrgios Went Down A Rabbit Hole At The Australian Open

Once again, fans followed Nick Krygios straight down the rabbit hole on Wednesday night as he was bounced out of this year's Australian Open at Hisense Arena in typically odd fashion.

And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall

Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call

Yep, sitting pretty at two sets to love up against Italian nemesis Andreas Seppi in the second round, Nick again went chasing rabbits. Dumped his serve at a crucial moment in the third, got done for an audible obscenity, smashed his racquet, ended up with a point penalty. Disappeared right through the looking glass. I didn't see any 'Drink Me' potion courtside, but he certainly seemed to have shrunk – or perhaps the stadium just grew – as he watched the third and fourth sets simply go up in smoke.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.

While he made a pretty good fist of the final set, even somehow earning himself a match point, he continuously shook his head in disbelief as though he was living in some kind of alternate reality.

Watching him hit a casual 'tweener' when he needed to break back to stay in the match at 6-5 down in the fifth – "I didn't expect that," Seppi said on court afterwards, as if under the impression you could possibly make sense of anything last night – you felt Nick had indeed reached another astral plane and had decided the best thing to do was just ride with it.

Perhaps he had. Two years ago, on the very same stage, Kyrgios beat Seppi in five dramatic sets to reach the quarterfinals. He heroically clawed his back from two sets down, even saved match points. King of Hearts stuff.

Not this time, and here's where reality begins to bend – even if just a little – as immediately prior to last night's match, Seppi told the Italian media how amazing it would be if he could come back from the same deficit, even save a match point, and then reverse the 2015 result.

It happened. He did. Maybe we were living in a parallel universe after all.

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards

"A lot of stuff's going through my head," Kyrgios said after the match. "The mental side of things are big for me. It's a massive part of it."

Feed your head, feed your head

As he sat in the bright lights of the press conference room under Rod Laver Arena last night, he may have felt the soundproofed walls were closing in on him. He looked sheepishly down at the flashy image of himself on his t-shirt and quietly zipped his jacket over it.

A longish pause. When finally asked what happened, he said, "I don't know, I just lost three sets. That's what happened."

It was an open and honest Kyrgios for the most part, discussing the need to take pre-season more seriously and the possible benefits of a coach, but he did prickle when told of John McEnroe's suggestion that he wasn't trying, telling the media to just ask John for all the finer details of how he was feeling out there. "He knows everything."

When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low

Go ask Alice, I think she'll know

In the end, Nick just needed to come down. "I'm pretty hungry. Just get some food, have a sleep, and we'll see tomorrow."

"It's about following your curiosity," Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick has said about their 1967 song White Rabbit, the lyrics of which are referenced here. "The white rabbit is your curiosity."

Kyrgios indeed.