Fire and ice: As Kohli exits, can we revisit Dravid's legacy too?

The scene was repeated in city after city. Young men outside barbershops, in twos and threes, posing for selfies to commemorate their newly crafted beards and newly fashioned fades, celebrated their coming-of-age by adopting the likeness of the pop culture icon of their generation.

- Kunal Pradhan

Legacies are a tricky business, and sporting legacies even more so; these morph all the time, in a heady cocktail of lived history and ice-cold statistics. Someone elevates them by reminiscing about a vital century at home, someone else adds to it with a vivid description of a fighting knock overseas, and some others pull it down by throwing statistics against the moving ball or recounting a failed series in a faraway land.

So, when Virat Kohli retired from Test cricket, a frenzy to decipher what it meant took over pundits around the world.

They knew that he was the defining batsman of his era across formats. That he didn't just fashion victories but also rebranded the sport in his own image. That he elevated the art of batting by striking an impossible balance between slashing risks and scoring freely. That he changed cricket's athletic paradigm by making fitness rather than finesse the foundation of a monumental career.

But they also knew that, with a Test average of 46.85, Kohli didn't have the numbers to faithfully illustrate his impact. An HT editorial, for instance, perfectly described him as being statistically closer to VVS Laxman and G Vishwanath than Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar and Rahul Dravid.