India, March 10 -- Played five, won five. Convincingly. That's India's report card from the Champions Trophy, a tournament they won for an unprecedented third time in Dubai on Sunday.

There can't be any one title sweeter than the others - this was India's seventh crown - because how can you play favourites when it comes to something like this? Each one is special in its own way. What makes this special is the circumstances under which it was achieved.

The Rohit Sharma-Gautam Gambhir management era had gotten off to a rocky start in Sri Lanka in August, with a 0-2 loss in a three-match One-Day International series. It went from the expected (a 2-0 defeat of Bangladesh in home Tests) to monumentally disastrous (an unparallelled 0-3 drubbi...