Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah and Virat Kohli after winning the T20 World Cup

Right, where do we start?

This isn’t an underdog story. This isn’t a feel-good tale merely passing by. This hasn’t bolted out of the blue, like the first one felt in 2007.

This is the journey of a team parched for thirteen long years. A cricketing superpower with immense power and supreme talent, caving under its own reputation each time a trophy came in sight. The India kit finally has another star over the emblem. No last-step stumbles this time.

But the triumph isn’t just redemption for a great cricketing nation: stitched inside the success are layers of personal vindication. The stories of some of this sport’s biggest stars, each desperate to live their dream, crushed by the fickle cycle of good and bad days, waiting far too long to taste glory again.

It’s a personal triumph…

…for Rishabh Pant, the boy who was blessed. He was yelling in pain fifteen months ago, his blood-curdling shrieks ringing through the corridors of a Dehradun hospital. No one could say for sure if he would ever properly walk again. Cricket was a very distant afterthought.

His knees were shattered, but his spirit couldn’t be.

He came back. He batted and kept like he used to. Life gave him another chance, he turned it into a World Cup. Comebacks can’t get sweeter: he stood with the trophy and smiled, wrinkling his eyebrows that still, quite visibly, house a big scar between them.

For Hardik Pandya, who had buried, deep inside, every fibre of emotion until the very last ball. And then, he exploded into tears. The dam of impassivity couldn’t hold any longer. When Rohit Sharma, his ex-IPL captain, lifted him in the middle of the Kensington Oval, Pandya stopped being public enemy No.1

​​”I've been very graceful not speaking a word,” he said, bawling his eyes out. “Things have been very unfair but I believed that if I keep working hard, I will be able to shine and do what I’ve always done, and that sums everything up.”

No more boos. No rift. Victory trumped vitriol.

For Jasprit Bumrah, India’s saviour ultimate. Two years ago, a Bumrah-less team was crushed in Adelaide. He was far away, overpowered by a stress-fracture to a back that usually carries a billion expectations. It can’t have ended there. But we feared, what if it did?

On Saturday, he held aloft the Player of the Tournament medal, the very heart of India’s success story. He’d limped away only to run back in stronger. Each strike of the timber was a reminder of his timelessness. He’s spent far too long merely collecting accolades. Those wizard wrists finally have something actual to carry home.

“I don’t usually cry after a game but the emotions are taking over.”

Cry a bit, Jasprit. Be slightly more human.

For Virat Kohli, still brushing strokes on his grand canvas of cricketing legacy. Until a couple of years ago, the canvas was chipping from the sides. The strokes had dried up, some scoffed if the painting was still beautiful. India’s long wait became Kohli’s long wait. As his magic waned, the noise grew inside and outside. When the 2023 dream fell flat, and this run-starved World Cup followed, you realised, grudgingly: great men can’t choose great endings.

“Really humbled by the game, big time,” Kohli said after the final, having hurtled through failure after failure, only to finish with the greatest joy and a grand farewell. “Put my head down and my ego on the side, and said: ‘You’re nothing. If you feel like you are everything out there, you are nothing. You really have to put your head down and respect the situation’”.

“And God showed me that if you try to get ahead of yourself, I will pull you back and keep you in your spot”.

He logs off on his own terms, the ICC quartet complete. Greatness finds a way.

For, Rohit Sharma, who lay flat on the ground, taking in the last moments of a T20I career bookended by two trophies. On that fateful November night, tears wiped on his long sleeves, Rohit had forced himself off the ground. So haunted was he to see a home World Cup slip, that he “had no idea how to come back from this the first few days”.

“I did not know what to do”.

Cut to June, and he’s done it. It’s maybe not “the ultimate prize” for him, but it will make him sleep better.

And finally, for Rahul Dravid, on his very last day in the India kit. Seventeen years ago, in a much lighter shade of blue, he slumped on the maroon-coloured leather seats of Queen’s Park Oval, watching a World Cup dream shattered to bits. Five months later, he withdrew from the first-ever T20 edition, never to play a World Cup again.

For half a decade, he handpicked and groomed India’s best kids, and then marshalled the men. Tonight, he screamed like his young students. The ghosts of the Caribbean from a different time had been buried. This was no time to be the phlegmatic Dravid. Rohit and Kohli were waiting with arms outstretched to toss him in celebration.

It means no less for the nine other India cricketers, or the reserve players who were just as delirious in the celebratory dance. For Suryakumar Yadav, ankle in cast not too long ago, submerged in doubts over how good he was when it actually mattered. For Kuldeep Yadav, a gem seemingly lost somewhere in the pandemic, reconstructing himself from zero to be a hero again. For Axar Patel, once a Ravindra Jadeja clone, now a fill-in no more. For Mohammed Siraj, once mired in grief, sorrow and spite, crying again on Saturday, but only in happiness. For Arshdeep Singh, the victim of vicious attacks after dropping a catch in 2022. No one took more wickets than him in 2024.

And all the others, the glimmer of their winner’s medals undimmed by the degree of their contribution.

No less the support staff, huddled together through the grief of 2023, their tears and cheers just a blurry background for primetime space. And, in some ways, the nine-digit strong count of fans, dealing with their own blues to follow the blues, crying and cursing, praying and cheering. Somewhere, somehow, living their own dream through the actual fifteen.

Rub your eyes and pinch yourself. The shiny thing is back in the blue corner.

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