Adelaide, December 2014. Virat Kohli is standing in as captain, he has a hundred in each innings, and on the final day India are chasing a total nobody in their right mind chases in Australia. The safe move is to shut up shop and take the draw. India went for it and lost.

That defeat told you more than most wins do.

A few days later Dhoni walked away from Test cricket mid-series. The keys were handed over in the middle of a tour, in the hardest country to tour, to a 26-year-old who had just announced exactly how he intended to play. India lost that series. Everything else about it said something had shifted.

What followed was roughly seven years of Indian Test cricket that I don't think I'll stop talking about.

The first real proof came in Sri Lanka in 2015. India lost the opening Test at Galle, undone by Rangana Herath — left-arm spin, no pace, no drama, just a series suddenly gone sideways. That was the old script: go away, lose the first one, fold. Instead India won the next two and took the series. First win in Sri Lanka in more than two decades, and they did it from behind.

Then came home, and home became something else entirely.

We stopped watching to find out who would win. We watched to see how. You'd say it out loud without blinking — let them come to India, they'll go back swept. That wasn't arrogance, it was arithmetic. Ashwin and Jadeja bowling in tandem on day four is not a contest, it's a countdown.

I remember walking into the Delhi Metro and seeing the New Zealand Test on a screen on the platform. I didn't check the score. I didn't need to. Fourth innings, Ashwin bowling — that was the whole forecast. One turning away, one holding its line, and you knew someone was about to be trapped in front playing for the wrong one. Then the arm ball, then out of nowhere an off-break that took the shoulder and floated to slip.

South Africa in 2015 tried the only thing left to try: they stopped playing. In Delhi, AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla — two of the best batsmen of that era — batted most of a day between them for almost nothing, purely to survive. They still lost the Test by a mile. When a great side decides its best chance against you is to not score, you have built something serious.

And in that stretch India didn't just win, India piled on. Kohli went through 2016 stacking double hundreds like it was routine. It stopped being a milestone and became a mood. Karun Nair walked in at Chennai for what was essentially one proper innings of his life and made a triple. That's the temperature the team was operating at.

Australia came to Pune in 2017 and punctured it, on a track that turned square from the first session. For about two days it felt like the spell had broken. Then India won Bengaluru, held Ranchi, and closed it out in Dharamsala with Kohli injured and Rahane leading. Even the one team that found a way through still went home behind.

England 2018 is the tour I file under how good it could have been. The scoreline says 4-1 and the scoreline lies. Two of those Tests were lost by less than the width of a session. Kohli had the tour of his life on a trip that was supposed to break him. At Trent Bridge, Hardik Pandya ran through them in a single spell and India won at a canter. India were in every game. They just kept losing the twenty minutes that decided them.

Which is what made the winter that followed feel like arrival.

Australia, 2018-19. India didn't scrape it — India controlled it. Pujara batted like the days belonged to him and the bowlers never let the pressure off. Australia weren't close. No Asian team had ever won a Test series there, and India won it looking like the better side in every department. That was the pinnacle.

It was also the first time I felt about an Indian team what people once felt about the great West Indies sides, or Australia in their pomp. You didn't watch hoping. You watched knowing. The method could change — a spell, a long innings, a session of pressure — but the ending didn't. They'd find a way and they'd win. The kangaroo got humbled in its own den.

We waited to see how long it would last. Then Adelaide happened.

December 2020. Thirty-six all out. The lowest total in India's Test history. Kohli flying home for the birth of his child, Shami out with a broken arm, and a squad that would keep losing players every single week of that tour.

What happened next is the reason this generation gets written about.

Rahane made a hundred at the MCG and India levelled the series with a debutant opener and a debutant seamer. Pujara did what Pujara does — blocked, blocked, blocked, wore the shine off, wore the bowlers down, took the body blows and stayed. At Sydney, with the game gone, Hanuma Vihari batting on one leg and Ashwin with his back seizing up simply refused to get out. Hours of not scoring, which was the entire point.

And then Brisbane. The Gabba, where Australia hadn't lost in a generation, with an attack cobbled together from whoever could still stand. India chased it down on the last day, Pujara wearing blows to his fingers at one end and Rishabh Pant coming of age at the other — a kid deciding that a fortress was going to be broken before tea.

Thirty-six all out to winning at the Gabba, in six weeks, with half the team missing.

I've always loved Test cricket, and that series is why. This is the format where you actually find out what someone is made of. There are no field restrictions to hide behind and no required rate to blame. A batsman has to invent a way to score. A bowler has to earn every wicket rather than wait for a mistake. And most of all, there are days when you are completely down and out and the only thing left to offer is character — stay there, take the hits, get to stumps. Then there are days when you have to press the accelerator and put a side on the brink before it knows what's happening. Both are the same skill, just pointed in different directions.

That team could do both, and that's rarer than any record.

Indian Test cricket is in transition again now. Kohli and Rohit are gone from the format, Pujara and Rahane are gone, Ashwin has walked away, Jadeja is closer to the end than the start. There's talent coming — there always is here. But a golden generation isn't a collection of good players, it's a group who happened to peak together and made each other braver. I don't know if we get that combination again in my lifetime as a viewer. Nobody gets to schedule it.

So I'm not going to spend the transition mourning. I'd rather lock the moment down while it's still clear.

Thank you for Galle and Colombo. For Delhi, where the best batsmen in the world couldn't score. For the metro platform where the result felt decided before lunch. For the summer you took Australia apart in their own backyard. For 36 all out and everything that came after it.

You made us believe before a ball was bowled. That's the hardest thing a team can do.