India, Dec. 7 -- Virat Kohli sits on 84 international hundreds today - 30 in Tests, 53 in ODIs, and one in T20Is - with Sachin Tendulkar's mythical 100-hundreds mark still 16 away. The gap looks small on paper. The real question is brutal: at 37, as a retired Test and T20I cricketer now committed only to ODIs, how many years of near-peak output does he realistically have left?

Let us start with the raw scale. Kohli has over 27,000 international runs, already in the all-time elite tier. In ODIs alone, Kohli has 14,557 runs from 296 innings at an average of 58.70 with 53 centuries - a century in roughly one out of every 5.6 ODI innings.

He needs 16 more international centuries and, with Tests and T20Is effectively off the table, we can tr...