In 1758 a Maratha army under Raghunathrao took Lahore and Attock, driving out the Afghan governor. Maratha authority extended briefly to the Indus, the furthest north-west any power from the Deccan has ever reached.
It lasted about three years. Ahmad Shah Abdali returned, and the confrontation ended at Panipat on 14 January 1761 with the destruction of the Maratha army.
The Maratha claim to the Punjab died there. So did the possibility of a single Indian power replacing the Mughals, which is why Panipat 1761 is treated as the hinge event of eighteenth-century Indian history.
The vacuum was filled by the misls within a decade.
The Maratha presence in Punjab left almost nothing behind except the memory of Panipat, and in Maharashtra the phrase for a catastrophe is still a reference to it.
Adina Beg Khan, the Punjabi governor who had served every side in turn, invited them in and paid them to come. The Maratha claim to Lahore rests on an arrangement with a local official rather than on a conquest, and he died within months of getting what he had asked for.
The Sikhs had taken Sirhind alongside the Marathas in 1758 and were the force still in the field in the Punjab after Panipat. What the Marathas could not hold, the misls took over the following fifteen years.
Panipat in January 1761 destroyed a generation of Maratha commanders and much of the army. The Punjabi memory of the battle is thin, because the Punjab was the corridor rather than the battlefield.