The most ironic celebratory scenes unfolded as the victorious Indian team took the ODI World Cup trophy around the ground in Navi Mumbai to Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami and Anjum Chopra and they all said "Thank you".
As a weeping Goswami towered over captain Harmanpreet Kaur on one shoulder and vice-captain Smriti Mandhana on the other, she whispered those two words with her eyes shut, almost not knowing how else to appreciate the gigantic effort of finally bringing the trophy home. Mithali then held the trophy high with the squad surrounding her, offering rapturous applause. She had come so close to winning it herself eight years ago. Now that she had it, she cuddled it as tight as she could, big, beaming smile on her face.
Chopra threw her arms around Harmanpreet with "you have done it," not long after she had said, "finally, finally, finally" on commentary, just as the Indian team's celebrations had begun. Perhaps she was counting the two World Cup finals India went down in, in 2005 and 2017, and that the third time was the real "finally" that sparked an endless celebration for the players and their families, both at the ground and the adjacent team hotel, all the way to the wee hours of Monday morning.
They took the trophy to Reema Malhotra as well, who turned out 64 times for India, and was Harmanpreet's senior in the 2009 and 2013 World Cups. The duo reunited and sang "Sadda haq, aithe rakh", a popular Hindi song that means "give me my rights, here and now," and largely symbolises rebellion and struggles against social and political norms.
The irony of thanking the current side lay in the fact that these former players were the ones who had paved the way, laid the foundation and groomed some of these players who were wearing World Cup medals around their necks.
It is the current fast bowlers who should be thankful to Goswami, who convinced her parents to let her play cricket as a teenager, for which she had to take a train every morning before dawn from her hometown in Chakdaha to Kolkata (about 80 kilometres away).
It is the current batters who should be thankful to Mithali for smashing a Test double-century four months before she turned 20 and then taking up the India captaincy at 21, chaperoning the side to two World Cup finals.
It was under Goswami that Harmanpreet made her international debut in 2009; it was under Mithali that Harmanpreet became vice-captain and then took over after Mithali's departure in 2022. Chopra, too, had shown a young Harmanpreet the ropes more than 15 years ago and now fondly calls her protégé kaptaan, an Indianised version of captain.
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"Yes, Jhulan di was my biggest support," Harmanpreet said after the final. "When I joined the team, she was leading it. She always supported me in my early days when I was very raw and didn't know much about cricket.
"I used to play with boys, and the school principal picked me up, and within a year, I started representing the country. In the initial days, Anjum supported me a lot. I always remember how she used to take me along with her team. I learnt a lot from her and passed it on to my team.
"Both of them have been a great support for me. I'm very grateful that I got to share a special moment with them. It was a very emotional moment. I think we all were waiting for this. Finally, we were able to touch this trophy."
Even though Harmanpreet was feeling "numb" at the press conference, she explained how this historic feat belonged to a myriad of people behind the scenes - families, close friends, coaches, who stood by them through the highs and lows. And all the former players, some of whom laid the foundation stone of women's cricket in India decades ago.
Two of them are Diana Edulji and Shantha Rangaswamy, who watched the players from the stands at the DY Patil Stadium on Sunday night. They are two pioneers of the game who started with nothing and continue to contribute in administrative capacities to date.
Rangaswamy was India women's first official captain in 1976, and was the first to lead them to a Test series win. Born in a family full of academicians, Rangaswamy didn't have the means to take a bus to college but went walking around Bangalore (now Bengaluru) to study and train for multiple sports. Early in her career, she even played with her father's broken bat against Australia before establishing herself as an allrounder.
Edulji, just two years younger than Rangaswamy, forced her way into boys' cricket teams in South Bombay and came from the generation that had to raise funds on their own for India women's first overseas tour of New Zealand in 1976-77.
Expectedly, the finances accrued weren't enough and they were forced to stay in the houses of a few Indian families and local players, which then became the norm for some of the future tours. Edulji was the first to lead India in a Women's World Cup, in 1978 at home, before Rangaswamy did it in 1982.
The trophy that the Indian team are still shooting reels with, perhaps belongs as much to the players who represented India, not just without contracts or match fees but especially under the Women's Cricket Association of India (WCAI), a body set up by lovers of the game in 1973.
The WCAI's history is dotted with its own share of financial difficulty before every overseas tour, before every World Cup - which even made India miss the 1988 edition - and until the BCCI took the women's game under its wings in 2006. By then, India had featured in six World Cups without much formal support or money.
The prize money of INR 51 crore that the BCCI announced the day after the World Cup glory in a way also belongs to those who shuffled between jobs to make ends meet while playing cricket. To those who defiantly fought against gender norms and initial administrative hurdles to set in place a system for girls to start thinking about cricket professionally, even after the likes of Harmanpreet and Mandhana had picked up their bats.
"This one's for those who were before us and set the foundation," Jemimah Rodrigues wrote on her Instagram on Monday.
It has taken generations of players, their parents, close friends and relatives to make all these efforts materialise into a World Cup trophy. The role of the media to popularise the game was also not lost on Harmanpreet.
As soon as she finished her press conference after the final, she called some reporters to the podium - especially those who have contributed to the coverage of women's cricket - and took selfies with nearly all of them holding the trophy. Coincidentally, they used the same words everyone around Harmanpreet had been saying: "Thank you."