second ball of the 19th over. The camera

panned to the gallery, where his wife Anushka Sharma was sitting with her head in her hands. No, nothing anticlimactic happened. The 18-year wait was coming to an end, this ball confirmed it. Immediately, disbelief filled Kohli and Anushka's eyes! This is what it feels like when you are so close to getting something you want so much!

To win the title from that situation, Bangalore would have had to just bowl routine balls, nothing more. And so, it was no accident that they managed to digest three sixes and a four in the next four balls. Virat Kohli's team had the last laugh with a 6-run victory. After a wait of 18 years, Bangalore has become the IPL champion.

Punjab also had the pain of losing

in the IPL final. In the 2014 final, they had to lose against Kolkata by 200 runs. But I feel that pain is not more than Bengaluru. The team has lost in three finals, and twice they have lost by single digits while chasing a small target. If the now-defunct Champions League final is also taken into account, then the team has had to endure the pain of losing in the final four times.

And in all these finals, only one cricketer has lost on the field, and that is Virat Kohli. In the inaugural season of that IPL, Bangalore had brought him into the team for less than half a crore rupees. Since then, many charioteers have changed teams, but Kohli is the only player who has played in all the tournaments, who has not changed teams even once.

He is still a hero today. The team scored 190 by batting first. He played the highest innings of 45 runs. However, there was a lot of discussion at the end of the first innings about whether the strike rate of his innings could have been higher. He played 35 balls to get this run. His innings was quite slow by modern T20 standards.

But even then, the team was on

the way to 200, because from the beginning to the 7th wicket, they hit two boundaries at least, and all but two of them scored at a strike rate of at least 160. However, Jitesh Sharma's innings had the most impact on the team's innings. He played an innings of 24 runs in 10 balls. His bat showed the team the direction of 200 runs. After his departure, Romario Shepherd's cameo of 17 runs in 9 balls was giving another 200 runs. But in the end, Kyle Jamieson stood in the way. He took 3 wickets in the last over and restricted Bengaluru to 190 runs.