After entertaining month of cricket action, now we have come down to the final showdown between the Lahore Qalandars and the Quetta Gladiators on Sunday at the Gaddafi Stadium.
Brisk half-centuries from Mohammad Naeem and Kusal Perera, followed by a collective bowling effort, led Lahore Qalandars to a thumping 95-run victory over Islamabad United in the HBL Pakistan Super League (PSL) 10 Eliminator 2 on Friday.
The defeat marked the end of United's title defence, while two-time champions Qalandars march forward and will take on leaders Quetta Gladiators in the highly-anticipated PSL 10 final, scheduled to be played at the same venue on Sunday.
Because when the league was suspended a fortnight earlier, Qalandars were arguably the hardest hit by absences from what remained of the season.
Sam Billings, Daryl Mitchell and David Wiese did not return. Sikandar Raza came back, but only for a game - a knockout against Peshawar Zalmi. Haris Rauf and Zaman Khan, two mainstays of Qalandars' back-to-back titles, were both off colour and extremely expensive.
Qalandars plugged those gaps by bringing in two Sri Lankans - Kusal Perera and Bhanuka Rajapaksa - who hadn't played T20 cricket in three and four months respectively; they combined for 83 off 48 against United on Friday. Salman Mirza, the 31-year old fast bowler who made his first-class debut in the giddy heights of the Logan Cup in Zimbabwe 18 months earlier, has sparkled, taking seven wickets in three games. Mohammad Naeem looked like a player shoehorned into the side for the sake of further promoting the Qalandars player development programme, but is now a mainstay of the top order alongside Fakhar Zaman and Abdullah Shafique.
But if Quetta Gladiators appear a sideshow in the final, it's because they've spent much of the last six weeks clinically stripping any jeopardy from their position. They last lost a match on April 18, and have produced seven wins in their last seven completed matches.
Most importantly, Finn Allen and Rilee Rossouw have returned, and another pair of Sri Lankans — Avishka Fernando and Dinesh Chandimal — made handy contributions in the qualifier that took them to the final on Wednesday.
More ominously, though, Gladiators' trusty local bowling core stacks up against any across the league this season. Mohammad Amir has been near that wicked, wily best that has made him such an asset to any T20 franchise; no fast bowler with more wickets as an economy rate as low as his 7.41.
Abrar Ahmed is joint-second on the wickets charts with an economy even superior to Amir's, while one of the men who joins him on 16 wickets is his fellow allrounder Faheem Ashraf.
Gladiators' journey is almost the mirror opposite of Qalandars', having made three of the first four finals while Qalandars spent each of those seasons propping up the table.
But though that victory in 2019 suggested the heralding of a dynasty, it was followed by a nosedive as the franchise lost its way, meandering meaninglessly through the next five seasons and missing out on the playoffs in four of them.
This year, they have meticulously worked to remove weaknesses from their side, while Qalandars appear to have done a phenomenally good job of papering over theirs.
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