Orange. Nothing rhymes with it, nothing looks like it, and nothing plays cricket like it. For the fourth time in as many seasons, Sunrisers Eastern Cape came to the SA20 final. For the third time, they conquered it.

Their opponents at Newlands on Sunday were Pretoria Capitals, the same team they beat in the 2023 decider. It's been almost three years since Roelof van der Merwe took 4/22 and Adam Rossington scored 57 off 30 to clinch victory by four wickets with 22 balls to spare in the final at the Wanderers. This time not even the burgeoning genius of Dewald Tobias Brevis could stop them.

He slapped Lutho Sipamla over square leg dismissively for six in the 18th. He removed his helmet, loosed his shaggy blond hair in the golden sunshine, raised his bat and his face to the sky, and addressed the heavens for several seconds even as he bathed in the sold-out crowd's adulation. Then he knelt on one knee and paused in contemplation. The seriously religious Brevis appeared to be thanking his idea of a higher power for allowing him to gift those watching, in person and from afar, a glittering innings. Well he might have.

Brevis' hoist off Sipamla took him to a century off 53. He was out three balls later, bunting a reverse scoop off Marco Jansen only as far as Quinton de Kock's gloves. His strike rate was 180.35 and almost three-quarters of his 101 - nearly two-thirds of the total of 158/7 - was reaped in fours and sixes.

His batting was sublime, all touch and torque, power and precision, strokes more sculpted than swatted. It helped explain, not before time, why Pretoria shelled out the equivalent of USD 940,000 for his services.

He mucked about for eight innings, scoring 141 runs and never more than 36 not out in a single game. Then, at the Wanderers last Saturday, Brevis' 47-ball 53 and Sherfane Rutherford's 74 not out off 50 helped Pretoria resurrect themselves from 5/7 to beat Joburg Super Kings by 21 runs with the help of Keshav Maharaj's 3/15 and Lizaad Williams' 3/25.

Four days later, in qualifier one at Kingsmead, Brevis' unbeaten 75 off 38 - and Bryce Parsons' 3/10 and 44-ball 60 - put Pretoria past Eastern Cape by seven wickets.

And now this, a performance that will shimmer in the memory for ages. Or at least until someone else scores a century in the SA20.

A measure of Brevis' importance to his team's cause is that they scored just three runs off the nine balls that were left in their innings after he got out. Jansen bowled an immaculate 18th that also yielded Maharaj's wicket and cost no runs. Then Anrich Nortje limited the damage in the last to a two and a single by Roston Chase.

Eastern Cape's reply began shakily when Lungi Ngidi had Jonny Bairstow caught behind with the fourth delivery of the innings, a sniping away-swinger. Things slid further south, to 39/2 after six, when De Kock skied Williams to mid-on. Chase and Maharaj did their bit by removing Jordan Herman and James Coles, and conceding only 22, while bowling in tandem from the seventh to the 11th.

Eastern Cape were 48/4 in the ninth when Tristan Stubbs bounced to the middle, in characteristic spaniel style, to join Matthew Breetzke. They were still together 65 balls later, having drilled 114 runs to win the match from pretty much nowhere.

Stubbs' 41-ball 63 not out was his first half-century in 52 T20 innings, and exactly what he should have done after sneaking into South Africa's T20 World Cup squad in the wake of an injury to Donovan Ferreira. Breetzke's unbeaten 68 off 49 was further evidence of his quality and temperament.

The match turned in the 18th, when Gideon Peters went for 21 - the biggest over of the match - which included a free-hit that Breetzke smashed over long-on for six.

Nine were needed off the last, which was bowled by Parsons. Stubbs put the issue to bed by launching the first two balls over midwicket and square leg for six. As the second sailed into the sunset, he leapt almost as high as Table Mountain in celebration.

So far, so orange. The only exception in SA20 history was at the Wanderers last February, when Kagiso Rabada took 4/25 and Trent Boult claimed 2/9 to ensure Mumbai Indians Cape Town's 181/8 was enough to win the decider by 76 runs. Their opponents? The orange agents, of course.

Who are different from the orange army, who poured through Newlands' gates in vast swells and swathes on Sunday. Had they all travelled from Gqeberha, some 800 kilometres eastward along the country's south coast?

"I live in Cape Town," one army member in his orange shirt said at Newlands on Sunday. "They were handing the shirts out for free. We could choose between these and the Pretoria shirts, and, well..."

He left his sentence hanging in the air. Because he didn't need to complete it. Why support Pretoria when you could shout for Eastern Cape? Even if you couldn't care who won, it was better to be out there in orange rather than in blue.

Rarely is orange a signifier of cool. It's rash and brash and what you see when you smash a pumpkin. Blue, by contrast, is the essence of the Miles Davis school of cool. But not in the SA20's alternative universe, where orange wins more often than not. Besides, nothing about Pretoria should ever be confused with cool.

Speaking of things cool, sometime during Brevis' bristling blast of an innings, as if conjured by some dark and twisted imagination, an ice-cream seller appeared in the pressbox. A reporter spotted his credit card machine and stared at him aghast: "What?! You want us to pay?!"

The modern cricketwriter would sooner complain about the standard of the free food we are served than step outside the cosseting pressbox and buy our own. Simply stepping outside the pressbox, perchance to gain a more lifelike idea of what's happening in the real world, is too much for many of us to bear.

We're also quick to moan if the distance we have to walk too far to the ground from our free parking spaces, if the free coffee is instant rather than the real thing, if the free wifi is too slow, and if the free power supply at our freely supplied desks goes down.

These days we're also disgusted at having to share our pressbox with legions of influenzas. They call themselves influencers, and they wouldn't know a googly from a thigh pad from a super over from a sold-out crowd from a laptop from a press conference. They probably struggle to tell orange from blue. We can tell them from reporters by the facts that they never seem to do any work, and by the noise they make - which increases in volume as the match wears on. But, like reporters, they know their ice-cream should be free.

Actually buy something?! Using our own money?! Are you mad?! How dare you?! We're reporters! And influencers!

Then again, the television commentators would probably have had the poor ice-cream seller arrested. Nothing in cricket is as dangerously over-inflated as the ego of the former player turned on-screen pundit. The mere presence of a lowly vendor in their pneumatically rarefied midst is an outrage punishable by jail time, in their expensively enhanced opinion.

The usual 10-minute interruption between innings was stretched to half-an-hour to accommodate for the plummeting arrival of four skydivers in a haze of green smoke. As well as a performance by a 24-year-old singer who came to something like prominence on TikTok. Will Linley, anyone? No, also never heard of him. He was a redhead. There it is again: orange.