Back in the intensely hot summer of 2005, India and Pakistan played a six-match ODI series that wound its way from Kochi in the deep south to Jamshedpur in the east, before finishing in New Delhi via the western outpost of Ahmedabad. With India 2-0 up in the series, Osman Samiuddin, whose The Unquiet Ones is the definitive work on Pakistan’s cricket history, and I took the train from Visakhapatnam to Jamshedpur.

One of our fellow travellers was a former India cricketer. After a while, seeing the myriad emotions darting across Osman’s face, he sighed and said: “Go ahead, you can ask me. Everyone does anyway.” That man was Chetan Sharma, whose decade-long career included 23 Tests, 65 ODIs, a 10-wicket haul at Edgbaston and a whirlwind ODI hundred against England.

But a decade after he quit the game, Sharma was remembered on the subcontinent and by fans in the diaspora for just one ball, to Javed Miandad in the Austral-Asia Cup final in Sharjah on 18 April 1986. Miandad had navigated a tricky chase with some aplomb, whittling down the equation to four needed off the last ball.

Sharma tried for the yorker but could not land it. Miandad smeared the knee-high full toss over midwicket for six, levelling the head-to-head ODI record between the two countries at eight wins apiece.

At the time It was just one shot but, as the years passed, it became a festering wound in the psyche of Indian cricketers. Matches against Pakistan were invariably lost, especially when they were finals played in the Middle East in front of capacity Friday crowds.

It took India nearly two decades to inter that particular ghost. In March 2004, with cricket diplomacy taking centre stage, they set off on a first full tour of Pakistan in 15 years. By then, the head-to-head record had skewed to 52-30 in Pakistan’s favour. In an opening game at Karachi’s National Stadium, watched by millions across the globe, India piled up 349. With a ball to go, Pakistan needed six to pull off the most incredible of victories.

In one of those delicious ironies that sport often throws up, Miandad was Pakistan’s coach, watching like a cat ready to pounce from the dressing-room balcony. But Moin Khan, the wicketkeeper who faced the final ball from Ashish Nehra, was no Miandad. His wild heave did not even clear the infield. In the years since, India have won 21 matches to Pakistan’s 20.

On these very pages, in the days before that 2004 series, the late Mike Marqusee had written: “Cricket, like other mass spectator sports, is a magnet for meanings, a malleable metaphor. And in the past, cricket between India and Pakistan has served as both a symbol of south Asian harmony and a prime example of what George Orwell called ‘war minus the shooting’.”

The key words here are “the past”. After the relative detente of the early years of this century, political ties have been Arctic frosty over the last decade. Cricket, once seen as a builder of bridges between the two countries, is now hostage to political agendas on both sides, and there has been just one bilateral series – three ODIs in India in 2012-13 – since Pakistan came to India in late 2007.

The current generation of cricketers has not played each other often enough to become steeped in the rivalry, or to form the sort of friendships that existed at a time when cricket showed the way.

This decade, India and Pakistan have contested just 10 ODIs (India lead 7-3) and six Twenty20 internationals – the majority of them in multi-nation tournaments such as the World Cup and Champions Trophy.

More than three decades ago, administrators NKP Salve, Jagmohan Dalmiya and Nur Khan fought the established order to move the World Cup out of England for the first time. The dream was that India and Pakistan would contest the 1987 final at Eden Gardens in Kolkata.

Both teams duly topped their groups but Craig McDermott’s five for 44 for Australia in Lahore and Graham Gooch’s 115 in Mumbai sent Imran Khan into a darkened room and a subcontinent into depression.

Going back to the World Championship of Cricket, hosted by Australia in 1985, India and Pakistan have met 12 times in 50-over tournaments featuring each of the world’s leading sides. While the overall record stands at 72-52 in Pakistan’s favour, it is 10-2 to India in the games that matter, including 6-0 at the World Cup.

Over the years, that statistic has come to have the same effect on Pakistani cricketers and fans as the Miandad six once did on Indians. But having made the final against all odds, Pakistan, revitalised by the feisty leadership of Sarfraz Ahmed, have the look of destiny’s children. Against a Virat Kohli-led India, who have the happy knack of finding ways to win marquee matches, they will hope that it is the spirit of Miandad, rather than the ghost of Sharma, that influences their performance.

Dileep Premachandran was editor-in-chief of Wisden India