The RCB IPL 2025 Victory Celebration Unfolds: There are things cricket cannot explain — not by stat, nor by replay. Why some teams win when they shouldn’t, why others come up short when they must. Why Royal Challengers Bengaluru, glitzed and glamourised into near-myth for 17 seasons, had to wait until 2025 to win an IPL title. And yet here they are. Triumphant, finally. The circle complete — or, perhaps, just beginning.
I find myself thinking of Bengaluru this morning, not as the city of software parks and start-ups, but as the place where hope did not die, even as seasons passed it by. At the Chinnaswamy, in the rust-red dusk, people came back year after year not because they believed RCB would win — not really — but because they needed them to.
They came for Virat Kohli, mostly. Not the celebrity — that was always inevitable — but the competitor. The man who stayed, when others passed through. He who snarled, and soared, and once scored a century with ten stitches in his hand. He who kept showing up, not just for himself but for something harder to articulate — an idea, maybe, of loyalty, of defiance, of doing things the hard way because it was the right way.
That he should now stand atop this IPL mountain, not with a smirk but a sob, tells you all you need to know. “This is mine,” he said, almost shyly, after the final. Not “ours.” Not “the team’s.” Mine. He gave them his youth, and now they give him this.
The city is ready. An open-bus parade will crawl through its bureaucratic heart, from Vidhana Soudha to the Chinnaswamy. There will be garlands, selfies, perhaps a tired politician or two. But really, it is not about ceremony. It is about catharsis. That this franchise — so often punchline, so often parable — should now be champion.
They will stop first at the chief minister’s office. Formalities. Then, come five o’clock, they return to the ground that knows them best. The KSCA says ten thousand might show. Likely it’ll be twice that. Numbers, in moments like this, are soft-edged things.
Somewhere in the stands will be fans who were there for that 263 against Pune. For the Gaylestorms, the AB specials, the heartbreaks that followed. Some will remember the surrender in 2016, when Kohli wept beneath fireworks that weren’t his. All of that, today, is redeemed.
And perhaps — if the stars align, and the traffic gods oblige — AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle will walk the ground once more, not as ghosts of unfulfilled potential, but as uncles of a long-laboured dream finally born.
RCB’s win is not a triumph of tactics, or economics, or data-driven ingenuity. It is a victory of persistence — of enduring faith in the face of mocking indifference. It reminds us that sport is not a spreadsheet. It’s a story.
And today, in Bengaluru, the ending is finally right.
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