U.S. OPEN: Djokovic will face Nadal for title in 37th meeting,

NEW YORK — The game took 21 minutes. It lasted 30 points.

Novak Djokovic squandered five break points and lost that instant classic of a game but made Stanislas Wawrinka pay an awfully heavy price.

After dropping the epic third game of the final set Saturday, Djokovic broke the next time Wawrinka served, then didn’t falter once he had the lead. The top-seeded Serb withstood a 4-hour, 9-minute onslaught of Wawrinka’s massive groundstrokes to pull out a 2-6, 7-6 (4), 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 victory and advance to his fourth straight final at the U.S. Open.

“Well, I was thinking — I guess everybody was thinking — ‘Whoever wins this game is going to win the match,’” Djokovic said. “After he won the game, I thought to myself, ‘OK, I guess I have to fight against those odds.’”

He did, to improve to 20-7 in five-set matches, and now the 2011 champion will go for his second U.S. Open title Monday against No. 2 Rafael Nadal, who had a much easier time in a 6-4, 7-6 (1), 6-2 victory over eighth-seeded Richard Gasquet.

It will be the third Nadal-Djokovic final at Flushing Meadows in the last four years, the only break coming last year when Nadal was out with a knee injury. They split the first two meetings.

It will be remembered for Game 3 of the final set, a back-and-forth roller coaster ride in which Djokovic had five opportunities to break for a 2-1 lead and lost them all.

Ninth-seeded Wawrinka had eight game points. Before the last, he gestured to the crowd to pump up the volume. Sensing the opportunity, Djokovic hammed it up, as well. Wawrinka followed that well-deserved break in the action with a 123-mph service winner up the middle.

“It was a really long game with some good points and some big mistakes,” said Wawrinka, of Switzerland, who made it farther than his country’s most famous player, Roger Federer, for the first time in any of his 35 Grand Slam appearances.

“He was quite nervous. I was really tired,” Wawrinka said. “I was struggling physically, and it was not easy to keep the level quite high. But, for me, it was just important to fight and not to let him go and not to lose 6-1 or 6-2, but just to try to get every game I can.”

The question now is whether Djokovic can recover for his final in time. He’ll have at least one thing in his favor: This year, the U.S. Open broke with its tradition of playing the men’s semifinal and final on back-to-back days, which gives Djokovic an extra day of rest.