It was meant to be Sanju Samson's evening.

The city had decided that much well before the teams arrived. The cut-outs were already up, the anticipation building through the week for Samson's first international in his hometown. It was a rare alignment of timing and opportunity, and everything around the ground suggested that the night would bend around him.

Instead, it bent towards Ishan Kishan.

Kishan did not drift into relevance in Thiruvananthapuram. He smashed his maiden T20I hundred, a 42-ball statement that swallowed the evening whole. It came fast, clean and without pause, the kind of innings that leaves no room for shared spotlight. The applause from the crowd followed the shots and the century celebration, even if the heart of it all had been tuned for someone else.

The shift was unmistakable by the time the game ended.

After Suryakumar Yadav collected the series trophy, he did something that has become a quiet tradition in this team. He walked towards the group assembled behind the "Winners" board, paused and handed the trophy to Kishan.

It was a poignant moment, heavy with subtext. Since MS Dhoni first began the habit, the trophy has often been passed on to the newest kid on the block. Virat Kohli carried it forward. Rohit Sharma did the same.

But Kishan wasn't new. And that was the point.

Having made his international debut in March 2021, when India beat England 3-2 in a T20I series, Kishan had done this before. He had held the trophy aloft for his team. Kohli was captain then. Four years on, in a different era of Indian cricket, Kishan was still here, holding the trophy not like a prodigy being welcomed, but like a player being let back in. It felt like a reintegration, a second beginning.

It wasn't that Kishan had gone nowhere in the years between. He had simply fallen out of step with time. In December 2023, Kishan went to South Africa as India's Test wicketkeeper but withdrew from the squad citing personal reasons. What followed was a difficult stretch: conversations around domestic cricket, availability, intent. There were ill-timed injuries. There was silence. And there was the slow realisation that in this Indian team, falling behind may be easy but catching up is not.