Whenever entries opened for the Sukhdeo Narain Inter-School Tournament in Patna, a young man would cycle nearly 90 kilometres from Samastipur just to collect the form. It was nothing Indian cricket hadn't seen before, but in Bihar, where ambition often outruns resources, those journeys, season after season, stayed with people.

Manish Ojha, a Ranji Trophy cricketer turned coach, knew the story only in passing, until one day the cyclist appeared at his door. He hadn't come for himself. Those days were long behind him. He had come for his eight-year-old son, Vaibhav Suryavanshi.

By then, Sanjeev Suryavanshi's sacrifices were already known. Loans had piled up and farmland had been sold to fund his son's training. Less visible were the routines that held everything together. Days that began at 4am in the morning. Journeys from Samastipur to Patna with his wife and son, first by bus and later by car, often with three or four boys in tow who would take turns bowling in the academy nets. Tiffin boxes packed not just for Vaibhav, but for everyone who travelled.

Once at Ojha's academy, then located in a small space in Anisabad, Sanjeev would settle in for the day. Watching. Waiting. Saying little. If one bowler tired, another stepped in. Vaibhav kept batting. 500 balls. Sometimes more.

The routine repeated every alternate day. On days they didn't travel to Patna, Vaibhav batted on the terrace at home in Samastipur. Sanjeev spent those mornings calling around, arranging for bowlers willing to make the trip the next day.

As a coach entrusted with a child still learning his craft, one with "more merits than demerits," Ojha was cautious in the early months."Bilkul hi baccha thha. Agar zyada tez daal dete, lag sakta tha [He was a child. If we bowled too fast, he could get hurt]," Ojha recalls in a chat with Cricbuzz. So for a long time, he stuck to underarm full tosses, synthetic balls fed gently from the hand. "At that age," he adds, "potential is very difficult to judge."