Virat Kohli has had a year to find the right words and he still hasn't. "I still say it's very difficult to explain to people in words how I felt in the last four balls of the last over," he tells the RCB Podcast (watch here) looking back on the night that he became IPL champion with RCB.

"When you see from the outside what has happened to the franchise, how RCB has been looked at for so many years... as a big team, big franchise that's never won - the almost champions, the ones that have come close but never really won the trophy. And for that pressure to build over so many years, like season after season..."

Kohli started with RCB in 2008 as a teenager, captain of the Under-19 India side. He was the only retained player in 2011, and watched the franchise build around him season after season. In his words, he gave the franchise his "youth, his his prime and his experience". He kept going back, season after season, even when heartbreaks and doubts piled up.

"There's one thing to observe it and there's one thing to live it. And I have lived through all of those seasons," he says.

When it finally happened on June 3, 2025, he sank to his knees on the turf at the Narendra Modi Stadium. Soon he was on his feet and running into Ravi Shastri's arms. Flanking him through the celebratory night were AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle, men who had given best to the franchise but couldn't see it over the finish line.

De Villiers arrived at RCB in 2011 and, in Kohli's telling, became something the team gave to the country. "AB became this icon in India after he started playing for us. How the fans embraced him, how they loved him. What he did for the team was beyond words, the impact he had..."

Gayle's story has a different warmth to it. Called up mid-season in 2011, he changed the IPL for good. "He was sitting at home, gets called mid-season, has the season of his life. His life completely changed within a week of coming to Bangalore." Gayle had also played for the Punjab franchise - the team RCB beat in the final - before the end of his IPL career. But that didn't matter. "He has a very soft spot for RCB in his heart."

Kohli said the franchise does that to people. Takes them in, makes them feel something, leaves a mark that outlasts the contract. "Our franchise, our city, our team, our fans has been about impacting people in a very natural way. And I felt that impact probably more than anyone over the course of 18 years."

Which is why the release, when it came, looked the way it did. "All those emotions, all those feelings came out in a form of just being on my knees and just holding my hands and saying, thank you. That I could experience this before I stopped playing."

He is measured about what might have been, doesn't say he'd have been broken by it, doesn't overstate it. But he gave a glimpse of what finishing off without an IPL title with RCB might have been like. "Although I wouldn't have carried on regretting it. But there would have been a part of me that would have wondered, you know, what it would have felt like to experience that moment."

And about the timing of it, after everything, he has no doubt at all. "I can for sure, with absolute honesty and clarity, say that it wouldn't have been 5% of the feeling I had, had we won it in the earlier years. And the accumulation of all that stress and all that pressure. And for it to happen after 18 years, there couldn't have been a better experience for me in my cricketing journey."