Hopefully some day, once he is done playing, David Miller will let sports science research his brain.
What he does day in and day out, what he voluntarily puts himself up for, is not a job for those who attach themselves to outcomes. Almost every match he plays - and he has played for 35 teams that qualify as representation on an ESPNcricinfo profile page - he agrees to put himself in a situation that could end up in ecstasy or heartbreak.
Well not every game, but the ones his sides chase in. Nobody in the world has stayed unbeaten in T20 chases as often as Miller has: 95 times. Nobody has been at the wicket as often as Miller has been when the winning runs have been struck: 80 times. He has outlasted Kieron Pollard, Andre Russell, MS Dhoni, Shoaib Malik, Dwayne Bravo and Glenn Maxwell. Nobody has scored as many unbeaten runs in chases as Miller. Had he not got out in this match, he would have gone past Malik's record for most unbeaten runs in winning chases.
However, it is the ones that get away that make a player. Cricket is a sport in which individuals fail more than you succeed. When you do that in the final moments of the match, it sticks with everyone longer than an opener getting out early.
It is a messy, messy time to be playing in. Often you don't have time to get yourself in, unlike the top order. Sometimes the ball is ragged and difficult. More likely, the dew is your ally. Quite often, anything under a couple of runs per ball raises the asking rate. Most often, you bank on the bowler to make a mistake and then let your instincts honed over decades of training take over.
Sometimes your instincts fail you. And Miller has seen failure. It takes a special kind of resilience to come back from the 2024 T20 World Cup final and agree to put yourself in same situations again. That was one miss that could have crushed the strongest of spirits. Sixteen needed off the final over after a stumble from a position of dominance, this was just the moment where he could have immortalised himself. He even got a low full toss at the start of the over, he had the wind helping him, but he could only send it as far as long-off.
Just imagine the amount of rumination it would result in for a normal person. The dark places this would take one to. Two years later, there Miller was, playing two Super Overs against Afghanistan in a match that could have ended their World Cup. Even there, his side ended up on the wrong side of a coin toss in the semi-final, and a world title still eludes Miller.
Barely a month later, Miller was out there again, setting up what looked like a win for Delhi Capitals against his former side Gujarat Titans, but then made a crucial error in judgement and didn't take the single that would have tied the scores with one ball to spare. Just his luck that on the day that he made that error, he was also batting with the one non-striker who was slow enough to not make the bye despite the ball being a slower bouncer.
The man was up in no time. Only a match had gone by, and Miller walked in with 42 needed off 25 against the defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru, saw it become 13 off 4, and then finished it off with a six, six and a four.
Miller is an old-school lower-middle-order batter, quite in the mould of fellow South African Lance Klusener before him. It is a guess from the outside, but I assume he trains the same way as Klusener did: hit a lot of slot balls for a lot of sixes because you can't do much with the yorkers.
"I knew that there were very, very few bowlers out there who could bowl six yorkers in an over," Klusener once told me. "Even if he is bowling four yorkers in an over, which is fantastic by any standards, he is still missing two. If I can take 12 off that over - two dots, two singles, and a six and a four off the bad balls - we are still winning the game. I needed to take advantage of the ones that they missed."
Admittedly it is not as straightforward as Klusener's times when death bowling was only yorkers, the principle possibly remains the same. Despite all variations available to the bowler, you wait for the error, and make sure you punish the error.
Even in that Bengaluru chase, the RCB bowlers gave him nothing in the first six balls off which he scored just six. It was only when Romario Shepherd erred that Miller "redeemed" himself.
It might seem "redemption" and "damnation" to those on the outside, but there is a certain amount of stoicism that professional cricketers carry for they know the vagaries of the sport. In the case of players like Miller, who tend to put themselves in match situations where recency bias apportions inordinately high blame or credit, you need higher doses of stoicism.
How Miller has done in this role of his is a matter of intense debate, but Dharamsala is a nice little middle ground that nobody will mind. He comes in a difficult situation, plays a special innings, falls just short, but those behind him see the team through.
Quite incredibly, Miller is only 36 despite having done this seemingly for a lifetime. He hasn't played an ODI since last March, but he hasn't retired, and could be putting himself up for this again next year in an ODI World Cup in front of home crowds. Or another T20 World Cup at the age of 38.
What a high it will be if Miller were to stay unbeaten in a tight win as part of a world title win for South Africa. What a downer if he fails. Either way, what a story if Miller is in the middle once again when it all goes down.