Tomorrow, 13 November, marks twelve years since the day Rohit Sharma made the cricketing world stop and stare. Paltan, if you were watching live back in 2014, you already know exactly what we’re talking about. If you weren’t, ask anyone who was, they’ll tell you where they were sitting.

It’s worth remembering how little that day promised at the start. Rohit walked out at Eden Gardens, coming back from a finger injury that had kept him out for the better part of three months, easing back into the side in a series India had already wrapped up. Nothing about the situation demanded anything from him. The first few overs gave no hint either, the innings started slowly, with no boundary for a good while, and early on he was let off when a chance went down in the deep. On most days, that kind of start fades into the background of a long-format game. This was not most days.

What followed was Rohit doing what he does better than almost anyone else in the sport, finding gears nobody knew were there and shifting through them one at a time. The fifty came gradually, the hundred with real intent, and from there the innings simply kept accelerating, each fifty arriving faster than the last. By the time he was done, there was no part of the ground he hadn’t used, the pull and the cut shot to anything short, the inside-out drive over extra cover, the sweep against the spinners, and the odd one dispatched down the ground as if the bowler hadn’t bothered to set a field at all. Pace, spin, width, and length, it stopped mattering. For one innings, Rohit Sharma had no weakness.

It’s the kind of knock that doesn’t need its full scorecard read out to be felt, though the shorthand version still stuns on its own, the highest individual score the format has ever seen, going past Virender Sehwag’s 219 that day, and one of three ODI double hundreds Rohit alone has gone on to score, a tally no one else in the game has come close to touching. Twelve years on, it remains the gold standard for what a one-day innings can be, not because of the number alone, but because of how completely he took the game away from Sri Lanka once he got going.

Tomorrow, Ro walks out again, this time at Bay Oval for the 4th ODI against New Zealand. India is in complete control, much like it was back then. Rohit has been relatively quiet with the bat so far this time around, nothing dramatic, nothing the Paltan has had much to shout about just yet. But history has a funny way of repeating itself around this man, and if there’s one thing twelve years should have taught everyone watching, it’s that counting out Rohit Sharma, quiet series or not, has never once ended well for the bowling side.

We wouldn’t put it past him. If there’s one man who can do it all over again, it’s the Hitman.