"Chal, tujhe kuch nahi hua hai (Come on, nothing's happened to you)"

With his head down, Rishabh Pant is muttering under his breath. It almost sounds like a mother comforting her child who's in pain. Pant is in pain here. We're at the SCG nets on Sunday (January 10) evening. It's around 5 pm and as Day 4 of the Test winds down, the Indian openers are holding court in the middle. The focus in the nets area though is on the pugnacious wicket-keeper. He's been accompanied there by two of the throwdown specialists and physio Nitin Patel.

Pant has faced a handful of deliveries before he begins consoling himself. He starts off by batting with the strap over his arm before asking Patel to take it off. Most of his stint is trying to play drives off Nuwan Seneviratne's left-arm throwdowns. You can sense his discomfort every second delivery as he feels the elbow take a brunt of the bat's impact with ball. But he keeps shaking off the pain. Instead he keeps shouting, "Don't get scared. Increase the pace," at Seneviratne before turning to Patel and going, "usko lag raha mujhe lag na jaaye (he's worried I might get hurt)."

The physio has now moved to the adjacent net and is checking on Pant after literally every delivery he faces. There are some the left-hander seems very comfortable facing but others where he grimaces before fighting off the pain. Twice he switches between batting with the strap on and without it before asking Seneviratne to start "increasing the pace" and start bowling bouncers at him.

"Wahan bouncer hi daalenge yaar, (Bouncers is what they'll bowl out there)" he declares. The throwdown specialist finally begins dishing out short-pitched deliveries after seeking Patel's permission as Pant unleashes a flurry of fierce pull and cut shots. There's sudden excitement within the mini group as Patel exclaims, "Shot Rishabh, it'll be surprise that will hit them hard. It'll be a big surprise."

It was a 25-minute net session on the sidelines of a crucial period of the third Test that in many ways set the tone for India's greatest escape on Monday (January 11). It was also one that was revelatory of the guts and gumption that this team and every single one of its players thrives on. Here was a young man gritting it out through considerable pain and agony, mothering himself along the way, for the sake of his country. Earlier in the day, Pant had been deemed to be fit enough to bat "only if necessary". But as he punched and pulled through the pain barrier, he was making sure it is he who would be in-charge of that decision.

On a surreal day of Test cricket, where India showed incredible character to eventually not just escape but get an Australian team to eventually give up the chase, Pant wasn't the only Indian cricketer to tell himself, "chal, tujhe kuch nahi hua hai".

It was the left-hander who turned the momentum of the game though when he walked out at No 5. It was the "big surprise" that the Indian management had clearly planned overnight. And it didn't just hit the Australians "hard", it rattled them. To the extent that it changed their approach greatly. No longer were their bowlers walking back to their marks with the kind of swagger you've come to expect from this world-beating attack. Considering Pant had already come out expecting the Aussies to bounce him out, and prepared for it too, he seemed to be on top of them, literally even before they let the ball go.

That he pounced on even the slightest width or error in length by driving with full force, despite the elbow, was an indicator of his inherent confidence but also the mind-set he'd carried to the nets the previous evening. He was still feeling the pinch ever so often though. You could see that especially during the drinks breaks when the reserve fielder would help him drink his water by holding the bottle rather than make the left-hander lift his arm any more than he needed to.

Cheteshwar Pujara had had his own bout of painkillers in the first innings when he battled through his injured finger, which remained covered in a blue bandage for the entirety of the match. On an up and down Day 5 pitch at the SCG, Pujara was not just battling it out against the Aussies' relentlessness, he was also fighting his own natural tendencies to let the opposition come to him. There were times during his wonderful partnership with Pant, where he took the attack to the Australians as much as his younger partner. It was his way of making sure that the intensity that Pant had brought to proceedings wasn't dulled away at his end. If anything, his intermittent aggression hit the Aussies as hard as Pant's take no prisoners attitude.

But even their complementary tag teaming would eventually pale in comparison to the collective will displayed by India's real heroes of the day, R Ashwin and Hanuma Vihari.

Ashwin had been struggling with back pain from the start of the fourth day's play. His movement had been restricted quite a bit but he still gutsed it out to bowl 19 overs and even get his nemesis Steve Smith out yet again. It got so bad later in the day that he could barely even sit or lie down. When he arrived at the SCG on Monday morning, it wasn't better. And he spent the entire morning and afternoon on his feet, stretching his back as much as he could against the dressing-room balcony railing. It was the same even during the tea-break when he simply couldn't even bend down and stayed on his feet, trying his best to keep his body mobile.

At the other end was Vihari, who'd done considerable damage to his hamstring very early in his innings. That he even could get himself to stay on his feet for as long as he did seemed a massive effort, forget having to battle the might of Cummins and Hazlewood trying to bounce you out, when they're not putting your footwork through an inquisition, on one leg. It seemed obvious at one point that Vihari had been given a choice by the physio to walk off. But he nearly turned his back to the Patel at that point. There were even times when the coaching staff couldn't bear to watch as he hobbled up or down the pitch. That he'd had a series without a big score to show for it, and with a big Test series at home against England coming up, this was Vihari putting his career on the line by staying out there.

If Ashwin didn't already have enough pain to contend with already, Hazlewood also made sure it was spread out a little more by striking him first on the right shoulder and then in the ribs. The physio at one point became nearly the third member of the Ashwin-Vihari relationship. But whether it was by using his thigh pad to protect the ribs or just putting his already beaten-up body on the line a little more, Ashwin hung in like a man possessed. In between all that, he also had to protect his junior partner from the verbal barrage of the Australians led by captain Tim Paine, getting the better of it by ensuring that the home team's frustration boiled over.

Alongside this mighty display of guts and glory, Ashwin and Vihari also set the bar on relationship goals by sharing the thigh pad, where at the end of each over the non-striker would have it perched in his pants at the back. As the overs ticked by, even though Ashwin and Vihari were the ones in the throes of physical adversity, it was the Aussie spirits that were being crushed in the middle of the SCG.

That the man padded and ready to come in, Ravindra Jadeja, was sat there in the balcony with a broken thumb, which needed surgery, just told you why this is the toughest Indian team of all time. Not often had a bunch of men, all needing painkillers to even stand their ground, come together in this fashion to save the day for their team and country. India might not have pulled off a famous win, but what they did was in some ways even great. It was a triumph of will and character that will perhaps remain etched as deeply in the history of Indian cricket as any of their greatest wins on foreign soil, including the one two weeks ago in Melbourne.

And they did it by constantly telling themselves what Pant did in the nets the previous evening, or at least believing in it.