CARY By any sporting standard, it was an unbelievable finish. By the standards of table tennis, it was nothing short of amazing. Two of the best U.S. players, 17-year-old Michael Landers and 33-year-old Yi Yong Fan, were locked in a sudden-death battle in the seventh game of the best-of-7 match.

Landers, facing triple match point down 10-7, came back to tie the score at 11, then 12, then 13 before pulling ahead for a 15-13 win, raising his arms in exultation over a critical victory in the round-robin U.S. Olympic trials.

In the stands at Cary's Bond Park Recreation Center, Sara Newens and Mina T. Son watched intently through the viewfinders on their cameras, impartial observers who just happened to have a huge personal stake in the outcome of the match.

As graduate students at Stanford, Newens and Son made a well-received short film about a Bay Area table-tennis prodigy, Ariel Hsing. Intrigued, after graduating in 2011 they embarked on "Top Spin," a full-length documentary about the young U.S. stars of table tennis: Landers, from Long Island, the 2009 men's national champion; Hsing, 16, the 2010 and 2011 women's champion; and her 15-year-old rival Lily Zhang.

"As we were about to graduate, a year later, we just thought with the Olympics, the timing was right," Son said. "We had never done a feature before, and we thought, let's continue on."

So began an odyssey that has taken them to China and Mexico and could conclude in London at the 2012 Olympics - if any of the three make it through the trials, which will conclude today in Cary, and then a final North American playoff against Canada in Cary in April.

"Sometimes, it gets a little annoying," Landers said of the attention, then chuckled. "Like it probably should be. But you just get through it. It's nothing too bad. I'm enjoying it, enjoying working with them."

Neither Newens, who worked as a video editor for CBS News, nor Son, a researcher for an entertainment-consulting firm, knew anything about the sport when they began the documentary. What they found was a topic ripe for exploration, because it's a sport everyone understands and everyone has played, but exists in an entirely different dimension at the elite level.

The ball spins and curves wickedly, the pace of play is frenetic and the table-tennis world, like the ball in play, is a small one, rife with unique personalities - from the precocious teens to veterans like Yong and 33-year-old Barney Reed, who ekes out a living as U.S. table tennis' only full-time professional.

That quirky but largely unknown world, combined with the mesmerizing repetitiveness of training and odd contortions of serving, plethora of facial tics and visceral responses to missed shots, drew Newens and Son into its orbit.

"Once we started to discover how intense the sport is and how competitive it is, and how you have to train just like any elite athlete has to train, it just became more exciting," Newens said. "The longer we do this, the more invested we are in each match, each point."

Everyone in the table-tennis world hopes a completed, successful film will bring the sport the exposure it craves, but there's some wariness. Newens and Son are not the first to recognize the sport's documentary potential.

"This is the fourth one that has started and that I've been involved with," Reed said. "Because of the finances of making a documentary and coming to fruition, as anybody knows, the costs are ridiculously high.

"If one of them would actually get made, and get out in the public's eye, it would let people see that this sport is actually a real sport, where the athletes do train six-eight hours a day, the reflexes that you have to have to play table tennis far exceed any other sport."

Last summer, Newens and Son raised more than $26,000 through the Internet fund-raising site kickstarter.com. That paid for the trip to watch Hsing, Zheng and Landers play in China, but they've spent it, and they could need as much as $400,000 to complete the film, particularly if they end up in London, or go to Germany next month for the world championships.

Neither is taking a salary from the project. They are both 32, and for the moment, this is their life.

While Son is taking a break in the media room, Newens returns from the gym with news of Hsing's match against Judy Hugh.

"Ariel's having a tough time," Newens said.

"Oh, what?" Son said. "With Judy? Wow."

"Interesting."

"I know."

Landers' later win against Yong was especially important for the filmmakers. In Landers' previous match, he was swept by 2011 national champ Peter Li, losing four straight games and suffering the final indignity of serving into the net on match point.

Twenty minutes after Landers lost, he still was sitting next to his coach at the end of the court, behind the banners reading, "Road to London," slumped in a chair. Across the court, Newens sat in the front row of the bleachers, her camera pointed at Landers, waiting.