Sachin Tendulkar made the choice easy, saying the joy of batting still gave him as much pleasure as it did when he first picked up a bat as an 11-year-old. “There is a spot on the bat, sometimes the ball hits it, and the sound that makes is lovely. You wonder, ‘how did the ball go so fast?’ It’s hard to explain, it just happens,” he told The Sunday Express .

“Every hundred a batsman scores is different, it requires different application. Sometimes you hit the ball from the middle right away, sometimes you hang around for an hour struggling — watching the game, not playing it. Every century is special. But it’s always made up of the little things.”

Among the little things is how Tendulkar prepares on the eve of a Test match — a routine that has remained almost unchanged right from his debut at Karachi in 1989. “I start getting in the zone when I pack my bag the evening before the match. If my clothes are not back from the hotel laundry, I start getting restless. I want everything in order, do not want to leave anything till the last minute. It’s something my brother Ajit taught me. The best you can do is be prepared for a game, be ready to go out there and play. The rest is just destiny.”

Tendulkar said his preparation for a series, too, had remained the same. “I have discussions with people, especially Ajit, on how to play a series, on what to do in practice before taking on a particular team. You visualise your shots, your innings. Every practice session must have a definite purpose.”

Perhaps another way to trace Tendulkar’s career is through his lows rather than his highs, and how he responded to each of them — losing his father during the 1999 World Cup, losing the final in 2003, and the dramatic, early exit in 2007. “I can’t believe time has flown by so quickly. It’s been ten years but it’s still hard to digest that my Dad is no more,” he said. “Between the 2003 and 2007, the 2007 World Cup was more disappointing. In South Africa, we had at least played well to reach the final. The loss to Australia was heartbreaking, but we had done some things right. In West Indies, we just played badly. We had a good team but there were a lot of issues — the batting order wasn’t okay, it was bad planning.”

Over the last two decades, Tendulkar has fulfilled the role of an icon with flair on the field and an unremarkable passiveness outside it. India would have loved him to be more vocal, more poetic in his expression, more overtly patriotic. But his special quality has been his almost stoical devotion to the art of batting — from the time he was struck on his nose by Waqar Younis in 1989, to the 175 in Hyderabad this month that put several things in perspective all over again.

Midway through the knock against Australia that made chasing 351 seem possible, the seven runs he had scored to reach an aggregate of 17,000 became redundant, and the figure itself somehow inconsequential. The full-bodied cover drive, the right-wrist-over-left-wrist flick, the cut over third man, and the return of the war dance down the track, were all you could think of. It was an innings that captured the essence of Tendulkar, that celebrated not the runs he has scored but how he has scored them — the journey and not the destination.

“When I think of that knock, and of the 136 against Pakistan at Chennai in 1996, no matter how well I may have played, the first emotion I feel is hurt,” he said. “If only we had won...Cricket is a team game, and victory is paramount. I watch myself batting from time to time — and I watch these innings as well — but it’s not the happy ending you like to see.