All On the Line, screams the giant billboards of Champions Trophy in all the host cities, from Dubai to Lahore cutting across Karachi and Rawalpindi. There is nothing extraordinarily imaginative or attention-grabbing about the caption. But it captures everything the tournament means to the country as well as its cricket. The global gaze would be on Pakistan’s competence to pull off a multinational tournament, bereft of distressing incidents, when the locals as well as the foreigners could watch the game without fear of their lives. But irresistible is the narrative arc whether Pakistan, liberated after remapping itself on the cricket map, could rediscover the old glory on the field. At the peak of 50-over mania, Pakistan was the cult team. The team of exotic and dark arts, reverse swing and toe-crushers, of roguish volatility and irascible brilliance, of alley-cats and superstars, a theatre and law unto themselves. If you didn’t blatantly love them, you clandestinely envied them. The slow fading of ODI’s charms ran parallel, and was entwined, perhaps, with Pakistan’s drift to mediocrity in …