The final ball had been bowled twenty minutes ago, but Rohan was still sitting on the boundary rope. The grass was damp under his cricket whites. Behind him, the pavilion buzzed with voices — his teammates talking too loudly, the way people do when they are pretending a loss does not hurt.

It hurt. Rohan had scored thirty-seven runs, his best in a final, but it was not enough. The other school's total was eleven runs higher, and those eleven runs felt like a wall he had run into face-first. He peeled off his batting gloves and set them on the grass beside him. His palms were red and creased from gripping the bat.

Footsteps on the grass. Rohan looked up.

It was Dhruv — the other team's captain. Tall, still in his pads, helmet tucked under one arm. He had scored the winning boundary, a clean drive through extra cover that Rohan had watched from the non-striker's end, unable to do anything but hear the ball crack against the fence.

Dhruv did not say "good game." He did not say "hard luck." He just sat down on the boundary rope beside Rohan, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and held out a water bottle.

Rohan took it. The water was warm — it had been sitting in the sun all afternoon — but it felt good going down. He drank half and handed it back. Dhruv drank the rest.

They sat there, saying nothing. The groundskeeper had started rolling the pitch in the distance, the heavy roller leaving dark lines on the grass. A mynah bird landed on the stumps and pecked at something between the bails. The shadows of the sightscreen stretched long across the outfield.

"Your cover drive off the spinner," Dhruv said after a while. "The one in the fourteenth over. That was the best shot I saw all day."

Rohan looked at him. "You won."

"I know." Dhruv paused. "But that doesn't change the shot."

From the pavilion, Rohan's coach watched the two boys sitting together on the boundary, the losing captain and the winning one, sharing water and silence. He leaned against the doorframe and thought: those two understand something that most adults spend a lifetime missing. The game ends. The score fades. The trophy gathers dust on a shelf somewhere. But the way you treat the person sitting next to you — that is the part that lasts.

Krishna says: be equal toward friend and foe, in honour and dishonour, in victory and defeat. Dhruv did not sit with Rohan to be kind. He sat because, in that moment, there was no winner and no loser — just two boys who loved cricket, and a water bottle with enough for both.