New Delhi, Oct. 17: By this morning, it was down to as few as 15; two hoicks to long on and a clip off the pads to square leg, no more. He’s done that too many times to recount or remember; suffice to say, perhaps, that they are the stuff of Shane Warne’s nightmares.

But this has been a shaken season, tough on believing.

Between the glare of terror and the gloom of the markets, we’ve turned wary and uncertain. We’ve begun to count our luck in ones — each day free of dirty death, each share spared the bottom, each job retained, each rupee earned or saved. Fifteen seemed far too many, enough to taunt faith.

Sachin had barely dodged the single-digit ghouls, scores of 13, 0, 27, 12, 5, 31, 6, 14, 13 and 49 since that January ton at Adelaide. Each of those outings began as a countdown to the inevitable, each ended with inevitability postponed.

Sachin played no mean part these past weeks punishing hope. Each time he went out, expectation surged. And each time, he blew it. A scorcher piteously morphing into a scratcher, a feared spectre that had retired from haunting the opposition and become a record-book ghost.

Even Sunil Gavaskar, mentor-advocate-fan, was riven with suspicions, he wasn’t enjoying what he saw. “I would not like Sachin to get to the big landmark in this fashion,” he said commentating on the first Test at Bangalore. “He shouldn’t get there with these little bits and pieces scores, he should do it with a good innings, a hundred or at least a fifty.”

It’s quite likely Gavaskar told Sachin what he thought in the dressing rooms at Bangalore. It is quite likely Sachin was intent on complying. Well past Brian Lara, and into his forties, he stepped out and skied one off Michael Clarke to long off this afternoon and immediately bit his tongue in regret; it floated beyond Mitchell Johnson’s jaguar lunge, but it had been a mis-hit, played early, off the splice. He had the record, but he hadn’t gone past 50 yet, not achieved the doyen’s bidding.

He bit his lip again and put his head down; when the wind is down, row.

His eighty-plus would have left Gavaskar more than pleased today — it wasn’t about beating Lara for him, that would have happened inexorably with time; it was about how Sachin got past that post. It was about Sachin defining a record, not the record defining Sachin.

Today’s cannot rank anywhere respectable in Sachin’s 247 Test innings, but it is probably deserving of prime space on our sagging and besieged mindscapes — as a tutorial in the triumph of trying.

Sachin isn’t new to doomsayers; he isn’t new to scattering them either. And it isn’t the pressbox pundits alone who’ve piled the pressure; it’s been his fans as much, expecting of a 35-year-old, the promises he made at 16.

He may have fulfilled more than he ever guaranteed, but there is never an end to greed and seeking; Sachin goes three innings without a hundred and they start declaring betrayal and, worse, death. Tondulkar quickly becomes Endulkar. It’s been upon him to fight off dark blame and dire prophecy.

Magically, he’s done that time and time over, against the run of life’s extraordinary costs exacted on someone still so young — knees eroded out of a quarter of a century of scampering, a back corroded by bending at the crease and crouching at the slips, elbows torn from flexing and falling.

Where he has defeated all of those ravages is in that one faculty he has zealously protected from external depredation: his head.

And here is where and how sport extends beyond itself and becomes one of life’s great metaphors -- Sachin’s is a feat of the will to endure, of tenacity against the tide; he is about the doggedness of seeing off a rough patch, not running away from it, he is about grafting when his gifts have deserted him. He wouldn’t have gone past Brian Lara today if he hadn’t had the gut to go past those sorry scores all season and still think he had it in him.

It’s been a tough season and it hasn’t been the first such one. But it takes a tough man to see them through. Welcome, grindmaster; you’ve probably shown us we’ll get there, even if we mostly count in ones.