Ranked No. 1 in the world and carrying streaks of four grand slam championship and with 30 consecutive major-tournament match victories, the notion of Novak Djokovic losing at Wimbledon to an American — any American, unless maybe John McEnroe came out of the announcer’s booth — seemed ridiculous.

But there was Sam Querrey yesterday, celebrating after Djokovic hit wide to end a match delayed by darkness and rain, spread over two days, with the world’s 41st-ranked player defeating its No. 1 by a score of 7-6, 6-1, 3-6, 7-6.

During most of the history of tennis, Americans ranked among the elite in men’s tennis — but that ended more than a decade ago, and Querrey’s third-round win has to be the greatest result by a Yank in a major since Andy Roddick won the U.S. Open in 2003 — the most recent grand-slam championship by an American man.

Querrey’s shocking triumph, however, almost certainly does not presage a new era of outstanding U.S. players.

If anything, it simply points up how far the American men’s game has fallen since the days of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi and Jim Courier and Jimmy Connors and McEnroe …

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It seems odd that a town would name itself after an onion, but that appears to be what Lezignan la Cebe has done.

“Cebe” comes from the Occitan word for “onion”, and about 500 years ago the local people began referring to their town by that name.

Here is the google-translate version of the Lezignan la Cebe wiki page.

Going with that name is not much different than calling themselves “Onionville” … but it seems to work for them.

And they are owning that distinction with their annual Sweet Onion Fair.

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The Wales soccer team is more Welsh than I imagined it would be.

I decided to have a look, after watching the rousing 3-1 victory over Belgium tonight that puts Wales in the semifinals of the European Championships being played here in France.

Seems like a team good enough to beat Belgium’s all-star side might need help from outside the country’s borders — taking into account Wales’s population of barely 3 million.

And, it must be noted all three Wales goals in the Belgium game were scored by players born in neighboring England.

End of the day, Wales has fewer borrowed players than does the U.S., which has a particularly German look and sound during the Jurgen Klinsmann regime.

Plus, the Englishmen who converted to Welsh nationality, for the sake of soccer, at least speak the same mother tongue as do their Welsh-born teammates. Can’t say that for all the German-Americans Klinsmann recruited to the U.S. national team.

To turn out for a non-native Fifa national side, a player needs to have at least one grandparent born in that country; the player himself need not be born in the country of the team for whom he will play.

So. Here are the numbers on the 14 players who played in the historic victory over world-ranked-No. 2 Belgium:

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In one category, anyway, the Los Angeles Dodgers are No. 1 in Major League baseball. That would be in spending money on players.

Not that it has led to any noteworthy successes on the field. Their last championship, as well as their most recent National League pennant, was in 1988. That was so long ago that Vin Scully was a kid of 60.

Their payroll this season is on the high side of $250 million, tops in the bigs, which has led to a team with only a few more victories than defeats. Business as usual in Chavez Ravine, that is. “Millions for mediocrity” could be this club’s slogan.

One player, however, is worth every penny the Dodgers give him, and that would be pitcher Clayton Kershaw.

He is the team’s one superstar, a nearly unhittable left-hander, a three-time Cy Young Award winner, 2014 MVP, potentially one of the dozen or so greatest pitchers in baseball history — who will be paid $33 million this season.

When he pitches, the Dodgers are a very good team. When he doesn’t, they struggle to stay above .500.

They will have to do without him until after the All-Star break, now that he has gone on the disabled list with a “mild disk herniation” … and the team is looking down the barrel of a lost season.

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In the name of bureaucratic streamlining, France has reduced its 22 departments — the largest administrative units in the country — to 13.

And some people are not happy — primarily those in suddenly larger units produced by shotgun marriages with former neighbors.

Languedoc-Rousillon, where we live, now finds itself joined to its western neighbor, Midi-Pyrenees, to produce a huge department that spreads from Montpellier in the east to Toulouse, the new administrative capital, in the west, to the Spanish border.

What would it be like, if this sort of “unifying” was projected onto the map of the United States?

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Over the past decade, international soccer has had no shortage of weird haircuts and weirder tattoos.

It’s all about “look at me”. It’s about branding yourself — sometimes rather literally.

I get it, to the extent that someone in the upper rows of a big stadium might have trouble distinguishing between players down on the pitch below — where they seem hardly bigger than ants.

But if you wear your hair in a “man bun” or the ever popular spiky Mohawk, or you have stained yourself from head to toe in indelible ink … well, chances are you will be easier to pick out of a crowd. It stands to reason, when you’ve got (hopefully) unique characteristics.

Ground Zero for hair and tattoo expression seems to be Europe, and perhaps it makes sense that Euro 2016 tournament, which has been a parade of 24 teams, here in France, would put on display daily some of the cutting-edge/most-ridiculous hair and tats.

And The Guardian, the English newspaper covering all things Euro, has come up with a couple of fun multiple-choice tests to see just how much you really know about Euro hair and Euro ink.

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This is a result widely being described as “England’s second exit from Europe” in five days.

Iceland 2, England 1, in the round of 16 at the Euro 2016 tournament in France.

Yes, Iceland. Previously known for volcanoes, blond people and, yes, ice.

Here in France we watched the match on BBC. And by the end commentators and analysts were struggling for new ways to describe how England lost to a country with a population of 330,000 — about the same as live in a bunch of English cities of which you are not familiar. (Coventry, anyone?)

It was so bad that several talking heads went back to England’s 1-0 defeat versus the amateur side fielded by the United States at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil — still considered the ultimate World Cup upset.

Whether this defeat was worse … opinion seemed divided.

Some of the descriptions of England’s performance?

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I have been to Death Valley and to Badwater Basin there. I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s left of Deadwood or the Alaskan city named Deadhorse. Those are pretty foreboding names — which do nothing but further intrigue tourists.

Aigues Mortes is a French entry in the “morbid town” competition. It translates from the Occitan as “dead water” — a name it has been carrying around for about 1,300 years.

Lots of events have happened at Aigues Mortes (pronounced: EH-goo mort) over 13 centuries, which must be a factor in one of the biggest wiki entries for a city of 8,300 people.

First, how did it come up with that morbid name?

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It was three years ago that I saw Ricardo Quaresma at what must have been his low ebb.

This would have been in Abu Dhabi, in the stands at Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium, where I watching the final of the President’s Cup — which pitted Al Ahli and Al Shabab on a stultifying May evening.

A decade before, Quaresma had, by some accounts, been the inspiration for a young Portuguese teammate named Cristiano Ronaldo.

But by January of 2013 Quaresma had tumbled into the UAE’s professional league after his most recent European club, Besiktas, had told him to get lost and ate the final six months of his contract just to be rid of him — apparently to the tune of 1.48 million euros (about $1.7 million).

That unpleasant parting followed on disastrous stints with Inter Milan, Chelsea and Barcelona, where Quaresma seemed more interested in demonstrating ball tricks than putting in a dependable shift.

(In 2008, while at Inter, fans of a Italian radio show voted Quaresma the Bidone d’Oro — emblematic of that season’s most disappointing player in Serie A.)

The Quaresma who turned up in Dubai, with Ahli, brought a name and a reputation for moments of inspired play– but not much else.

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Andorra is one of Europe’s several microstates. Others include Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Malta and the Vatican.

And if you get within a few hundred miles of a microstate, don’t you pretty much have to go? Just for the novelty of stepping into the country, and then stepping right back out?

So, we packed up the car with some snacks and some caffeinated drinks, in case the drive got boring … and off we went on another Sunday expedition.

And?

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