An hour into Day 5 in Colombo, Shubman Gill paused at the pitch. He stared at it, searching for clues, answers, potential ploys. It was the first drinks break, but he was distracted. The game was delicate, and no amount of electrolytes would have sufficed. Only a wicket to end a stubborn seventh-wicket stand could have satiated the Indian captain at that point.

This was Day 5 déjà vu. In Galle, Dhananjaya de Silva and Sonal Dinusha had held fort against India for an hour and a half before India broke through. In Colombo, it came with a twist, and more variables. Galle was straightforward: pick wickets, win the Test. Colombo was more complicated: pick wickets, then chase, with the threat of rain eating into the available overs. Conventional wisdom called for attacking fields to pick quick wickets and wrap Sri Lanka's innings up quickly. But the flipside was easy runs swelling the target, while the thought of time played on the back of Gill's mind.

It was the kind of morning where India needed more of everything: wickets, effort, luck. Sri Lanka had practically begun on 16/6, clinging to hopes of batting out hour by hour, phase by phase, and taking the game as deep as possible. A lot of that hope rested on Sonal Dinusha still being in the middle, batting as though his life depended on it.

Early on, Gill brought every trick in his Test-match copybook to the decisive day. The spinners got shorter spells to protect their fingers and maintain the revs on the ball, while the pacers were instructed to go short, with a short leg and leg gully waiting to pounce. It was a busy start for the Indian captain, constantly walking and talking with bowlers between deliveries, tweaking fields as he went. But as the day progressed, Gill's demeanour almost mirrored India's grip on the game. The more Sri Lanka batted, the more resigned he seemed to his team's fate.

Dinusha and Keshara Nuwantha added 100 runs in the morning session, walking back knowing that a third of their task was already complete. As they headed towards the tunnel leading to the dressing room, the support staff applauded them from the balcony two tiers above.

But such are the beats and rhythms of Test matches that you're almost never out of the trenches until you truly are. In the first over after Lunch, Manav Suthar had Nuwantha edge one to Dhruv Jurel at second slip. For the next two-odd hours until Tea, India and Dinusha were locked in a game of chess. India had seen enough of the young No.6 batter and the conditions at play to know that the easiest route to a favourable result would be through the other batter. India did everything to put Prabath Jayasuriya in the line of fire: they drastically shifted fields when they needed to get the No.8 batter on strike and the quicks even bowled outside the leg stump at Dinusha on the rare occasion where he faced up to the sixth ball of the over. It was a delicate game of strike that Dinusha was mostly acing.

But India kept at it. Suthar even went funky: he bowled from over the wicket, diagonal. The sight was unusual. The left-arm spinner ran in between the umpire and the stumps before delivering from an awkward angle, but it didn't yield results. Soon enough, the game even slipped into superstition territory: Mohammed Siraj did the now-popular bail switch in between one of his overs.

Sri Lanka also rode a massive slice of luck. The ball was turning big, but somehow, Jayasuriya and Lahiru Kumara did just enough to keep the outside edge of their bat centimetres away. Jaysuriya did it for majority of his 28-ball stay while Kumara dug in for a 90-ball innings in the company of Dinusha that broke India's resolve. The turn was slow off the wicket, emboldening Dinusha to comfortably premeditate his sweeps while the tail could commit forward confidently.

A day like this could be deflating for a young captain. Gill admitted to almost second-guessing his previous calls, but walked away knowing his team had done everything it could.

"It gets very frustrating," Gill said of the day and its impact on Test captaincy. "Then you start questioning, was follow-on the best decision? Was it not? But then you kind of have to go back in the moment and see, what can I do? Did I take the best decision in that moment? Yes, I did. Then you can't do anything about it, you have to keep trying your best and I think we did that. We tried all that we could."

Privately, Gill might rue the absence of a bowler like Jasprit Bumrah, his ultimate man friday in conditions like these. Gill in fact, had a shadow version of Mohammed Siraj too, his fifth-day hero from last year's Oval Test. Siraj struggled for rhythm and pace all series and bowled 14 overs fewer than Prasidh Krishna.

But this result was neither entirely down to bowling quality nor the conditions. The truth lies somewhere in between. For every Oval and Galle, there will be a Colombo where the final day might not pan out as desired, where an opposition player simply knows how to tame the conditions better than everyone else who sets foot on the ground. Days like these are when captains have to swallow their pride and doff a hat to such a performer. Gill, to his credit, did just that.