India, June 7 -- The scene was repeated in city after city. Young men outside barbershops, in twos and threes, posing for selfies to commemorate their newly crafted beards and newly fashioned fades, celebrated their coming-of-age by adopting the likeness of the pop culture icon of their generation.

Legacies are a tricky business, and sporting legacies even more so; these morph all the time, in a heady cocktail of lived history and ice-cold statistics. Someone elevates them by reminiscing about an important century at home, someone else adds to it with a vivid description of a fighting knock overseas, and some others pull it down by throwing statistics against the moving ball or recounting a failed series in a faraway land.

So, when Vira...