There has been a sense, through the first half of a disappointing second World Cup campaign for Afghanistan, that an early chapter of their cricketing history is closing, reports https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/cricket.
On the biggest stage, they lost their matches playing a style better suited to T20 than ODIs, wasting promising positions routinely. Before the tournament started, they sacked their captain Asghar Afghan, amid political infighting.
They have seen one of their best-known players, the chunky keeper-whacker Mohammad Shahzad, head home in a huff, and they dropped Najibbulah Zadran, one of their top performers.
Few question that they have the talent to compete with the best (they tied with India in September), but this might be just the jolt that shifts them from fairytale to global force. Optimism that they could pull off an upset is evaporating, fast.
So, perhaps this is a good time to reflect on the context of their achievements and the remarkable journey to this point.
Sarah Fane, the founder of British charity Afghan Connection, has watched its evolution to this point. When she made the first of her many visits to Afghanistan in 1987, during the Soviet-Afghan War, cricket was not on the nation's agenda.
She was a medical student on the Pakistani border, then a doctor working with refugee women in a Mujahideen camp. She returned in 2001 to visit a mother-child clinic and set up Afghan Connection, having found a country "catapulted back into the dark ages".
"After that particular journey, visiting when they'd had all these years of war, seeing the impact on the families, listening to the women's stories, life could never be the same again," she says. "In 2001, it was ground zero."
She says that despite a population of more than 20 million, just a million children were in school - and only 5,000 of them were girls. "There was no infrastructure, the roads were poor, and there was no communication - no radio, television, phones," she says.
Fane began giving talks and fundraising, then began Afghan Connection, whose work has moved from health projects to education. They have built 46 schools serving 75,000 children and trained many teachers.
Around the time (2008-09) Afghanistan embarked on their remarkable rise up the ICC World Cricket League Divisions with tournament wins in far-flung places like Jersey, Tanzania, and Argentina, Fane's son noticed that the family's favourite country's cricket team was beginning to make a splash.
So Afghan connection incorporated cricket in their work. She enlisted the support of MCC, and received funding from the British government and private donors. They work with Raees Ahmadzai, the former national captain, on coaching.
"We took bats and balls out to the team when they just had a dust field in Kabul as their national academy," says Fane. "Now we've built over 100 cricket pitches in 22 provinces serving 100,000 kids. We've coached 4,500 kids, trained lots of teachers in cricket and we've held tournament."
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