The lunch break might have been the worst part. Forty minutes of stewing on it, pacing up and down while the pit in the stomach grew deeper.

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After five Tests and the best part of 20 days of cricket, the Border-Gavaskar Trophy was about to be decided, and the tension had reached an unsustainable level.

It doesn’t matter how many of these sort of Test matches you’ve lived through, the feeling will forever be the same. It’s a helpless anxiety, one you almost feel guilty for.

Sport shouldn’t make you feel this way, but it does, and it’s wonderful.

The morning had been frenetic, maintaining the breakneck speed with which Australia and India had played this entire Test, but when winning time arrived it felt like the world stopped turning.

Each and every one of the 162 runs Australia required for a win, to earn the right to lift the Border-Gavaskar Trophy for the first time in a decade, was going to be laboriously fought for.

And with all of that and more swirling around the players’ heads, and on a pitch as treacherous as it was on the opening morning, Australia bravely, triumphantly held its nerve.

In doing so, these cricketers righted the wrongs of four years ago when they lost the unlosable series to a patchwork Indian side. They finished the job in a way they couldn’t in England 18 months ago, when the Ashes urn was retained but the series was painfully drawn.

They defied history in coming back from a horrific loss in the first Test of the summer, making this just the fifth Test series in history that Australia has won after going down 1-0. The panic was justified after Perth, but now only serves to enhance the glory of Sydney.

This is now the defining victory of the Pat Cummins era.

His men had conquered both the T20 and ODI World Cups but were missing a Test series win of such substance. There had been a breezy home win over England and an away series draw, but only defeats against India.

The World Test Championship was fun but series like these are where legacies are built. For this team to stand alongside the other modern greats of Australian cricket it needed a win like this, fought over five gruelling Tests against a high-quality opponent.

Australia had to go deep into its bench to pull it off, debuting three players whose ages spanned three decades and losing a key fast bowler halfway through.

It required genuinely stellar bowling from Scott Boland, forever on the periphery of the first-choice XI but among the very best bowlers in the world. The loss of Josh Hazlewood was a blow, but without Boland’s exceptional SCG performance Australia does not win this series.

It also took a key contribution from a man they call The Slug from Snug, and who is now nationally beloved.

Beau Webster was probably content spending his summer giving throwdowns and running drinks, such is the selfless team-man he appears to be. But when thrown his opportunity in the most important Test match of the summer he more than made a name for himself.

Batting has rarely looked harder than it did at the SCG this week, for everyone except Webster. This gigantic Tasmanian with the long levers of steel was compact, solid and unfathomably composed in the biggest moment of his Test career.

Webster saved Australia in the first innings and steered it home in the second. Whether he plays five more Test matches or 50, he will forever be able to prop up a bar back home in Snug and spin the yarn of the time he won the Border-Gavaskar Trophy for his country.

The scorecard might make it look like Webster and Travis Head did it easy, and by the end they did. India conceded defeat with about 30 runs left to get, at which point the batters were able to walk singles to a spread field and Mohammed Siraj had trudged off to the sheds, beaten and broken.

But everything up to that point was absolute cinema.

Everyone started the morning on Jasprit Bumrah-watch, desperate to see if the game-breaking champion was going to overcome his back issue to bowl. No SCG sleuth had cracked the mystery until the precise moment India gathered in its huddle before the fourth innings began — with Bumrah a conspicuous absentee.

Bumrah would later be rightfully named the player of the series, but this was a sad way for his one-man crusade to end. He had bowled himself into the ground, carrying his team until his body crumbled under the mounting weight.

A run chase of 162 was right in that awkward sweet spot, too big to blast away and too small to chisel at. On this pitch particularly, it was going to take a bit of both.

Sam Konstas’s wild opening salvo was unrestrained madness, and the shot he eventually got out to was a park cricket special, but the young man’s innings did as much to get Australia home as any of his teammates. He and Usman Khawaja scratched off 39 runs for the first wicket and very quickly ruined the Indian mood.

The impact of Konstas on this series has been profound. It has not always manifested in the runs tally, but he has been a bolt of lightning into the Australian team with his provocative energy and infectious positivity.

India has been on the back foot since the moment Konstas strode to the crease on Boxing Day. His will be a quite fascinating career.

When Steve Smith fell one run short of 10,000 runs, something that is going to drive him absolutely bonkers until he gets over the line in Sri Lanka, the score was 3-58 and India had a path to victory.

His dismissal was a rare source of joy for Virat Kohli, who after receiving some attention from the SCG crowd began a lovely little pantomime referencing the ball tampering scandal of 2018.

Perhaps fortunately for Kohli the lasting memory of his series won’t be this tasteless game of charades, but his incredible ability to nick everything he looked at all summer. Regardless of what you think about his actions, there is no doubt the Virat Kohli Australia first met in 2011 is the same one it farewells in 2024.

The lunch break safely negotiated, Khawaja played his most telling knock of the series with a pivotal 41 before Head and Webster united to ease Australia over the line.

The Aussies celebrated — in public, anyway — with a weary restraint. There was pride on those faces but an acknowledgement that it took every last bit of their grit and talent to cross the line in front.

Those are the best kinds of wins. When you’ve had to get up off the ropes a couple of times, and every last member of the squad has answered the bell when it rang for them.

When the quality of your cricket and the character of your cricketers break attendance and viewership records, giving life to a game so many are determined to declare dead.

When you dislike your opponent just a little bit, but respect the hell out of them at the same time. When they are just as dogged as you and so it is always hard, even when it looks easy.

When you can sit around a change room and play “remember when?”, telling stories of Starcy’s first ball in Adelaide, Travis flaying them everywhere at the Gabba and that cheeky little bugger Sam ramping Bumrah — Jasprit Bumrah! — in front of 90,000 at the MCG.

Pat Cummins’s team has won it all now. But right now, for this long and sun-soaked afternoon at the SCG with family and friends, none of those victories could possibly hold a candle to this one.