One match at home
The second season was arranged around a single fixture. In October 2016 the league chairman Najam Sethi said the board hoped to play the final in Lahore; in February 2017 he confirmed it. Everything else, including the two eliminators and the qualifier, stayed in Dubai and Sharjah. The plan required overseas players to fly into Pakistan for one match and out again, and not all of them agreed to. Four of Quetta Gladiators' overseas players opted out, among them Kevin Pietersen, who had been their first pick in the inaugural draft; the league allowed teams to replace anyone who declined. Darren Sammy, the Peshawar Zalmi captain, travelled.
The security operation was on the scale of a state visit. What it produced was a Gaddafi Stadium holding a reported 27,000, the first Pakistan Super League match played in the country, eight years after international cricket had stopped there.
The tournament around it
The group stage was tight enough that four of the five sides finished on four wins. Peshawar Zalmi and Quetta Gladiators went through on the back of a no result apiece; Karachi Kings and Islamabad United, the holders, took the eliminator places, and Lahore Qalandars finished last again.
Quetta won the Qualifier by a single run, making 200 for 7 in Sharjah and holding Peshawar to 199 for 9. Islamabad's defence of the title ended in Eliminator 1, where they were bowled out for 82 chasing 127 against Karachi, Imad Wasim taking the match award. Peshawar then beat Karachi by 24 runs in Eliminator 2 to set up a rematch of the Qualifier.
Lahore, 5 March
Peshawar batted first and made 148 for 6, a total that looked ordinary until Quetta batted. Darren Sammy, the Peshawar captain, took the man of the match award; Quetta were bowled out for 90 in 16.3 overs and lost by 58 runs, at that point the widest margin in a final of the competition. Kamran Akmal, whose 353 runs led the tournament, was named player of the tournament.
The other story
The season was also the one in which the league's anti-corruption problem became public. Sharjeel Khan and Khalid Latif of Islamabad United were provisionally suspended during the tournament under the board's anti-corruption code and sent home without replacement. Both were later banned for five years. Sharjeel was found to have accepted money to play two dot balls against Peshawar Zalmi; Latif was found to have taken bat grips from bookmakers as a signal and to have approached other players. Mohammad Irfan, Nasir Jamshed and Shahzaib Hasan received bans of a year each, and Mohammad Nawaz two months.
That the league could suspend two international cricketers mid-tournament, and that the Pakistan board rather than the International Cricket Council ran the investigation, was treated at the time as evidence the competition was being governed seriously. It sat oddly next to the celebration in Lahore a fortnight later, and both belonged to the same season.