Royal Challengers Bengaluru have done it again.
Back-to-back.
I have supported this franchise since 2008. Not casually. Not as pleasant background entertainment. The kind of support that has physiological consequences. The kind where the eighteenth over of a close game is genuinely not good for you.
For nearly two decades, RCB losing was almost cosmological in its consistency. We did not merely fail — we innovated in failure. Other teams lost cricket matches. We produced original interpretations of entropy, taking commanding positions and dismantling them with a creativity that bordered, honestly, on genius. You could not manufacture that kind of chaos deliberately. It had to be sincere.
And it was. Completely, tragically sincere.
That sincerity was the point.
When we finally won last year ; seventeen years in - it did not feel like sport. It felt like a collective nervous breakdown resolving itself. Strangers embraced. Grown adults wept. For a few hours every RCB supporter was younger, lighter, briefly cured of something they hadn’t known was a wound.
That was the summit.
Tonight was different.
Kohli played like a man who had simply decided the result in advance and was now executing. Gujarat were restricted, chased down, dispatched. At one point I noticed that Romario Shepherd had been retained in the eleven!!! again by Andy Flower, through every selection meeting, against the sustained prayers of an entire fanbase. There he was. In the final. We won anyway, without requiring him to do anything consequential. In any previous season that observation would have triggered a minor cardiovascular event.
Tonight it felt like a line item in a project report.
The franchise that once specialised in emotional catastrophe has become a machine. A well-calibrated, professionally managed, genuinely frightening machine.
And I find I miss the catastrophe.
This is the most structurally absurd complaint possible.
And yet.
There is something about hope-without-evidence that is irreplaceable. Hope with evidence is just probability. Pleasant, but it doesn’t do what hope is supposed to do — which is make you feel, briefly and irrationally, that the universe is personally interested in your outcomes.
RCB used to make me feel that.
Now they make me feel like a well-informed stakeholder.
The first trophy is a miracle. The second is confirmation. The third is a KPI.
Somewhere in that progression gratitude becomes expectation, and expectation quietly kills the thing that made it worth wanting in the first place.
I will watch every game next season. I will still build elaborate causal theories about how a dropped catch in the powerplay has structural implications for events occurring six weeks later. Some things don’t change.
But a part of me mourns the old days. The impossible days. The days when an RCB victory felt less like a probable outcome and more like evidence that the universe occasionally makes exceptions.
That feeling, it turns out, was the actual product.
The trophies were just proof it happened.
