On the thirty-first of May, Royal Challengers Bengaluru won the IPL final in Ahmedabad, chased down Gujarat Titans with twelve balls to spare, and Virat Kohli walked off unbeaten on 75. It was their second title in a row. I want to sit with that small phrase, second in a row, because a year ago it would have sounded like science fiction. For eighteen years, RCB had won nothing at all.
I am not a neutral here and will not pretend to be. But you do not have to love the team to find the story useful, because it is one of the cleanest examples I know of something I think about constantly as a builder: the gap between finally succeeding and proving the success was not an accident.
Eighteen years of being the joke
For most of the IPL's life, RCB were the league's lovable disaster. They had the biggest names, the loudest fans, and a real genius for losing in the most painful way available on the night. They reached the final in 2009, in 2011, and in 2016, and lost all three. Their own supporters turned their hope into a punchline, chanting "Ee Sala Cup Namde," this year the cup is ours, every single season while knowing it almost certainly was not. Eighteen years is not a slump. It is a personality.
Then in 2025, after more than six thousand days, they finally won, beating Punjab Kings by six runs. The release was extraordinary, the specific kind of joy that only that much stored disappointment can produce. If the story had ended there it would still have been a good one. A long wait, a deserved reward, roll the credits.
The encore is the real test
But here is the part that interests me more than the first title did. They went and did it again.
Anyone can have one good year. A hot run of form, a few calls that fall right, a tournament where the bounces go your way, and suddenly you are champions. The first title answers the question "can you win?" It does not answer the much harder one, the question that actually separates a fluke from a fact: "was that real?" Only the second title answers that, and it answers it for good.
The first win tells you it was possible. The second tells you it was not luck. Everything I have learned about building says the second is the one that counts.
I see the same shape in companies all the time. The first time something works, a launch, a product, a good quarter, the honest feeling underneath the celebration is relief, plus a small private worry that you might not manage it twice. The encore is what kills that worry. It is the difference between "we got lucky" and "we know how to do this." It is also much harder, because the first time nobody expected anything and the second time everybody does. RCB won their first title carrying eighteen years of failure. They won their second carrying the weight of being champions, which is its own burden. Handling both is the entire point.
Kohli, and the case for staying
You cannot tell this story without Kohli. He has been with RCB since the franchise began in 2008, through every one of those eighteen empty years, in an era when almost everyone else chases the better deal at the better team. He could have left a dozen times and won sooner somewhere else. He stayed. And in the 2026 final, at thirty-seven, he reached a fifty in twenty-five balls, the fastest of his long IPL life, and finished unbeaten.
There is a version of loyalty that is just stubbornness and a version that is conviction, and the only way to tell them apart is the ending. Kohli's looked like stubbornness for eighteen years. Now it looks like the best decision he never stopped making. The reward for staying is that when it finally works, it is unambiguously yours, with nobody to share the credit and nobody to blame for the wait. I have a soft spot for that, having argued before that the people who stay and actually operate the thing earn a kind of credibility that the people who pass through never do.
What the IPL became
It is worth remembering how improbable the whole stage is. When the IPL launched in 2008, plenty of serious people treated it as a gimmick, a noisy, cash-soaked experiment that real cricket would tolerate for a season or two. Instead it rewired the sport. It proved a domestic T20 league could become the financial center of gravity for a global game, it changed how players are valued and paid and developed, and it became, for two months a year, the thing an entire country arranges its evenings around. Almost every T20 league in the world now is a copy of a model people were sure would not last.
There is a lesson in that alone, about betting on the format everyone calls a fad. But mostly, in 2026, the IPL is just the stage on which one team finally stopped being a joke and then, more impressively, refused to become one again.
In the oldest piece on this site, written nineteen years ago, I argued that you cannot judge a cricketer by a single innings. You cannot judge a team by a single trophy either. You judge them by the second one. Which is why RCB, of all teams on earth, finally have nothing left to prove.