Mohammad Ali erred in line slightly, going straight at the pads. By now, it was meat and drink for Aaron Hardie, who had reached his personal Everest two hours earlier with the ball, and was about to summit again in the other discipline. He threaded it through the midwicket gap, sending the ball scuttling across the Gaddafi grass to the boundary. It brought up a 35-ball half-century, the first in his T20 career outside his home nation.
Earlier in the evening during the PSL final, Hardie was the instigator of Hyderabad Kingsmen's collapse, striking first to remove their talismanic captain and his fellow Australian Marnus Labuschagne towards the back end of a powerplay Peshawar Zalmi had been pelted in. Across four wily overs, Hardie used his mix of cutters, variations, and angles, going back and forth from over to around the wicket to remove Kingsmen's top-scorer Saim Ayub, as well as mopping up the lower order with a couple more wickets. It was a maiden four-wicket haul for Hardie in T20s, his best franchise figures since, well, Zalmi's previous game, in which his 3 for 24 over Islamabad United secured them first-class passage through to this final.
It was perhaps harsh that Babar Azam finished his tournament the way he did, lashing out at a wide delivery, only to nick off and fall for a golden duck, missing out on pulling away as the all-time leading scorer in a single PSL season. It may have been equally unfortunate for Kusal Mendis, so canny at finding narrow gaps through the covers, to instead slice one straight to backward point. For a team that had lost the fewest wickets, and scored at just shy of the highest strike rate in the powerplay all tournament, being reduced to 40 for 4 in five overs was almost unfairly unrepresentative. And for all of those things to happen in the final for statistically the most dominant side in a single PSL season felt particularly cruel.
And yet, it is precisely that which might secure Zalmi's legacy as a contender for the greatest PSL side in a specific season. There was a bit of a misconception flying around about this team until Sunday that its success came down not to the quality of its team but the timing of a few purple patches. Until Sunday, Babar and Mendis had been responsible for more than 60% of Zalmi's runs in the tournament. Sufyan Moqim may have led the wickets charts by some distance, but there wasn't a Zalmi bowler within a mile of him; he was the only representative from his side in the top nine. Could they just be a three-man side sheltering and carrying their team-mates, scrambling for fresh paper for the cracks within that would ultimately be exposed?
Even Kingsmen, their unlikely opponents in the final, were not immune from this kind of thinking, which now appears distinctly wishful. Hunain Shah, whose heroics sealed their place in the final, kicked off the mind games moments after their win over United, gently but clearly pointing out the difference between his side and Zalmi.
"Everyone is performing in our team," he had said. "Someone or other is standing out, and it's a different person almost every game. When you've got so many match-winners, then you don't run into too many difficulties, and it's very difficult to plan against us. If we're planning against another team, we know it's the top two or any particular individuals, and we plan against them. But it's difficult against us because from top to bottom, many different players have put in match-winning performances."
It does not take much reading between the lines to demonstrate what about Zalmi Kingsmen aimed to target. But as you don't go bursting past a speed limit if there is no hurry, Zalmi had, in this tournament, barely been given a reason to move out of third gear. And it was, in part, the security of the quality they had in reserve that took so much of the pressure off Babar, Mendis and Moqim, whose glittering performances overshadowed smaller, consistent, contributions across the board.
Before the final, Hardie had scored just 77 runs in the tournament, but needed to face only 50 balls. His innings included 20 off 10 against United in the Qualifier, and an unbeaten 10-ball 26 in a group game when he came in at the death and used his ability to tee off from the very outset to maximise the target Zalmi were setting. It complemented his bowling utility for Zalmi, when, like supporting characters offering stellar cameos, he would chip in with a handful of overs and pick up the odd wicket.
Abdul Samad, the man with whom Hardie partnered for a priceless 85-run stand that steadied Zalmi's nerves after Kingsmen had ostensibly removed all their match-winners from the action, scored only 132 runs across the season, but a whopping 104 of them came in fours or sixes, and a strike rate of just under 190 demonstrates exactly what his role was.
With the ball, Nahid Rana, who Zalmi cajoled the BCB into permitting to travel for the final, backed up his early-season form with a furious spell of 2 for 22, culminating in a wicket-maiden. His economy rate of 5.44 from five games made him the most economical bowler in the league, with no one else so much as managing below a run a ball.
There was, of course, hat-trick-taking Ali Raza, with his wiry frame, waifish arms, toothy grin and other-worldly pace; the little-known Mohammad Basit, whose left-arm seam offered a point of difference, and Michael Bracewell, each of whom picked their moments to shine. This, perhaps least of all, was a team bloating their figures off the back of a few others greedily sponged off.
The joke going around after Kingsmen, who had packed their team with Australians, both players and coaches, qualified for the final was that perhaps that's all you needed to secure success. On Sunday, Hardie became the next - but almost certainly not the last - man to demonstrate they might have been right, just not in the way they might have hoped. Maybe, in this world of marginal games, it helps, against a side that has produced the most Pakistan-adjacent run to the final, to be wearing resplendent yellow.