It's the sort of deafening roar that fans who are now of slightly older vintage might remember with nostalgia for when India's second wicket used to fall. It reaches a crescendo in a second. However, this was not an international game involving India and featuring Sachin Tendulkar. And at Chepauk, the roar came at the fall of the third wicket for Chennai Super Kings, as MS Dhoni strode out.

Just like it used to happen with Tendulkar, the score - Super Kings were a fairly dire 27 for 3 in 4.5 overs - didn't matter.

Dhoni began in usual fashion, nudging here, pushing there and gathering runs in a trickle rather than a flood. That would come later, repaying the faith of the faithful with not just victory on Sunday, but victory orchestrated by their hero.

As Dhoni's, and Super Kings', innings against Rajasthan Royals progressed, the captain realised the slowness of the pitch that impeded strokeplay would be offset more and more as dew set in. Dew would make the ball come onto the bat better and make it more difficult for bowlers to control the ball. That was when Dhoni began to accelerate, and it was calculated. Where the bowling demanded respect, he respected it. Where he knew that he could muscle the ball, he exploded.

Dhoni's first 15 balls brought only 12 runs. The next 20 balls brought 28 runs. And at that fateful moment, with Dhoni on 40 off 35 in the 18th over, Dhawal Kulkarni bowled a shoulder-high full toss. The ball had slipped out of his hand, but the pronounced effect of the dew was nothing compared to the pronounced transformation in Dhoni. The free-hit went for a powerful six over wide long-off, and Dhoni rocketed away, 35 runs coming off the last 11 balls he faced, including three sixes to finish against a hapless Jaydev Unadkat.

He had the crucial luck that innings of this type - coming in with the bowlers on top, the track difficult, and the opposition having at least one gun bowler - needed. The man most likely to trouble Dhoni (and every Super Kings batsman for that matter), was Jofra Archer. Royals had given him the new ball, and he had promptly bowled a wicket-maiden in the second over, but after that Ajinkya Rahane took him out of the attack. As soon as Dhoni came in, Archer was brought back on. As Ben Stokes would say later, "We tried to attack him, getting him out was our main objective."

Archer's first ball to Dhoni was back of a length, coming into the batsman at pace. It took an inside edge and trickled onto the stumps via boot - but hit them softly enough that the bails stayed in place. Dhoni could have been walking back for a two-ball duck, but all Royals could do was give wry smiles. He could have been walking back for 28 off 27 too, having clubbed a full delivery from Stokes through cover with some force. K Gowtham was perhaps a little slow to react inside the circle and only got his left fingertips to the ball. It was the kind of catch that either sticks, or doesn't.

Dhoni faced only two balls from Archer early in his innings, and by the time he batted against Stokes, he had already begun to get a feel for the conditions, having faced 19 balls. There were only two bowlers in the Royals attack who could have bashed a hard length into Dhoni's hips and cramped him for room. But Stokes didn't opt for that line, and by the time Dhoni faced Archer for a second time, it was the back end of the innings, where both Dhoni and dew were flowing freely.