It’s hard to imagine you haven’t heard about Alex de Minaur and his now fiancé Katie Boulter, but what about the other tennis couple strengthening ties between the two fine sporting nations? A love match, clearly.

Down in Wagga Wagga this week, one of the more remarkable sporting comebacks of the tennis year has quietly unfolded in a town Katie Swan had never been to before, and less still ever had on her bucket list, even if her boyfriend Alex Bolt is from Australia.

As she slalomed from side to side across the baseline, whacking balls back across the net with abandon, she racked up another win she once thought impossible.

Late last year, she told her parents and Bolt she was done with tennis. Over. Never playing professionally again. For the next four months, she travelled with Bolt, a pseudo “coach and WAG”. It was fun, but by her own admission Swan was a “bit lost”.

“But Alex is like my rock,” she says. “Everything I’ve been through these last two years, he’s been there for me. He would be the same with me whether I stopped tennis fully or I decided to continue.

“It’s great to be able to talk to someone who’s been there and understands. He’s very calm himself, which has helped me off the court as well with losses, as well as wins too. He’s very measured.”

Bolt needed to be measured because Swan’s prognosis was dire. For nearly two years, she couldn’t get through more than two or three matches in a tournament without her back descending into crippling spasms. Harder to take was she didn’t know what the exact issue was.

As a teenager, she had a terrible accident while tubing off the back of a boat. The mishap displaced four ribs and caused severe nerve problems. It led to a bulging disc in her neck, too.

“That was the worst pain I’ve ever had,” Swan says of the tubing saga.

“There was some stuff I was carrying for a long time which didn’t really get resolved when I was young, and is now affecting me as I’m getting older. The nerve problem was the thing which was affecting me the most.”

How she made it to 118 in the world and represented Great Britain in the United Cup might have been a miracle itself, but eventually the pain was becoming too much to bear.

She lost a lot of matches, withdrew from others. The last came at a W35 event in Roehampton in the weeks after Wimbledon when she walked off the court after losing the first set of a first round match against Gabriella Da Silva Fick. Afterwards, she thought she’d never play again.

“I told my parents I was finished,” says Swan, 26.

“I started doing some coaching. I was living in Arizona and a guy there who is my coach now, I told him everything I was going through and he said he knew a doctor who would be able to help me. It was kind of a last chance type thing.

“I felt like there was nothing to lose.”

Dr Malcolm Conway pitches himself as a long-time healer for athletes with chronic pain. He argues most are treated with outdated methods. Swan weighed it up. What did she have to lose?

“I spent two weeks with this doctor in Pennsylvania and the treatment he did helped me a lot,” she says. “I was able to come back to do some slight training and it was the first time in like two years without any problems.”

But it’s another thing to start thumping around the court, hour after hour, day after day, and hoping to win matches.

Her ranking had plummeted as a result of the lay-off, to outside the top 700 in the world. Undeterred, Swan took her medicine and entered lower tier events around the world when she felt ready, starting in Egypt, then the United States, Spain and now Australia.

She dubbed it Katie 2.0.

“I feel a lot calmer in general, which I think is really nice,” Swan says. “I’m able to enjoy my life more around the tennis.

“Matches are matches and I’m doing my best every day. But if I lose, it’s just a loss – it’s nothing bigger than that. You’ve just got to keep moving forward and enjoying the people I’m with.

“I don’t really have any expectations, and that’s hard sometimes because I know my level and what I can achieve. I’m trying to take it day by day and be more curious about what I can achieve rather than put any expectations on it.”

Last week, Swan racked up her third title of the year in the $45,000 Wagga Wagga Tennis International and wants to make it back-to-back in the second event being run by Tennis NSW in Riverina. It was the first time a professional event had been held in the regional NSW centre.

Her smile at the presentation said it all, and a few words of congratulations from Bolt afterwards meant the world.

“If you told me I’d be where I’m at now, I would have thought that wouldn’t be possible based on how I was physically the last two years,” she says. “It’s different, but I feel like this is part two of my journey in tennis.”