APRIL 8 ― Sport doesn’t often conjure up fairy tale endings, but there was a happy exception on Sunday as Sri Lanka’s cricket T20 World Cup Final victory over India allowed legendary duo Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara to head into T20 international retirement by helping their team to record their first major tournament victory since 1996.

Their success was even sweeter for the fact that Sri Lanka have endured a number of recent agonising failures, with Sunday’s victory coming after no less than four final defeats in the last seven years.

Jayawardene and Sangakkara played in all those losses, and it would take a cold heart to begrudge these magnificent players their golden moment.

They are, without doubt, firmly among the best players of their generation from all over the world, not just Sri Lanka, with both featuring in the top ten of all-time run scorers in test match cricket ― a form of the game they are both now expected to continue playing.

As well as scoring more than 11,000 test match runs at an average of 50.30, Jayawardene is also third on the all-time list of One-Day International appearances, taking more catches than any other player (non-wicketkeeper) in the history of the game.

Sangakkara’s achievements are just as great, with the elegant wicket-keeper batsmen standing fourth on the all-time ODI run scoring chart in addition to his outstanding test match career.

With fellow greats Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Kevin Pietersen, Graeme Smith, Jacques Kallis and Rahul Dravid all ending their superb test careers in the last couple of years, we have even more reason to savour the remainder of Sangakkara and Jayawardene’s exploits on the test stage, even if we won’t be seeing them in T20 action again.

Sri Lanka's players celebrate after they won the ICC Twenty20 World Cup cricket title as India's captain MS Dhoni (left) and Suresh Raina look on at the Sher-E-Bangla National Cricket Stadium in Dhaka April 6, 2014. ― Reuters pic

Aside from the individual glory for their two star players, Sri Lanka’s victory on Sunday is remarkable when you take into account the vast gulf in resources between their opponents in the final, India.

With a population of just 20 million people, Sri Lanka is an unimaginably tiny fraction of the size of cricket-obsesses India (population 1.2 billion); being able to take on and beat their far bigger near neighbours is a splendid feat.

But it is no great surprise, because Sri Lanka have been overachieving in world cricket for the last two decades. I spent a month on the beautiful islands in the summer of 1994, at a time when their national cricket team was still gradually emerging into the elite from their former status as a secondary power.

Within two years of my visit they were world champions, with master (if at times controversially ultra-competitive) batsmen Aravinda De Silva and Arjuna Ranatunga inspiring a World Cup triumph in 1996 which firmly established Sri Lanka’s place amongst the sport’s more traditional powers.

Although they have been blessed with many fine players, the next decade and a half was dominated by three men more than any others: Jayawardene, Sangakkara and Muttiah Muralitharan, the off-spinner who ended his test match career in 2010 with exactly 800 wickets ― 92 more than his nearest challenger, the Australian wrist spinner Shane Warne.

As well as being indisputably brilliant, however, Murali was also a controversial figure due to his unorthodox bowling action and he was officially branded a “chucker” (a bowler who effectively cheats by failing to straighten his arm prior to the moment of delivery) by a number of umpires during the middle phase of his career, a reputation he never fully escaped.

Since Murali’s retirement, however, the team’s progress has been maintained with a huge influence from their remaining stalwarts, Jayawardene and Sangakkara, culminating in this weekend’s long overdue tournament win.

With both now aged 36, Sri Lanka will hope they can continue to rely on their services in the test match and One-Day arena for a while longer yet; so should we.

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.