The Darby world title reign has been just about my favourite thing in wrestling in forever. I didn't get to see the PPV live, but I bought the replay when I got home on Sunday night and watched the whole show unspoiled over the next day. I hadn't bought a wrestling PPV in about 15 years! And I pretty much enjoyed the whole show, even if I never paid a ton of attention to some of the matches. It was primarily a purchase driven by this match though, and the winner being up in the air made the live experience (well, blind experience) a really fun one. I haven't seen all of the matches these two have had together but I've at least seen ONE, and that was the Full Gear 2021 match that I wound up liking way more than I'd have expected if you'd told me beforehand how it was going to go. MJF has never seen Darby as anything more than a stunt show idiot and certainly not a professional wrestler on the level of MJF himself. In 2021 their feud was built around Friedman talking shit about Darby's deceased uncle and then the match started with a headlock because MJF said Darby couldn't do one or something. I don't know, look it up. MJF won that match when he hit Darby with a punch while wearing that big stupid ring he has and then pinned him with a side headlock takeover. Darby won the belt from MJF last month with the same headlock takeover pin (after giving him a low blow). If you'd asked me how I figured this match would start I wouldn't have needed to go very far down the list before I said "maybe a side headlock takeover?" There were a number of callbacks in this, even obvious to someone like me who is not exactly steeped in the LORE of AEW. The Savage/Steamboat roll-up sequence is a tired trope at this point but I wasn't shocked they went to it and it isn't the first time they've done it either. What they played off most, though, was the last month of Darby's career, his title reign, and I can at least say I've watched that. I thought in general it came off really well. This was Darby living fast and dying hard, going out the only way he knows how. He said as much in the lead up to this - he doesn't care about legacy, he cares about living in the moment and taking on anyone who challenges him for the belt. He's done that and then some, defending the title seven times prior to this, sometimes twice in a week. He could only hold out for so long before exhaustion or wear and tear caught up to him. Against Guevara he passed out while applying the Scorpion Deathlock, the first sign that he maybe can't keep burning this particular candle at both ends. It happened again here and it might've ultimately cost him. He couldn't come back from the abuse he normally puts himself through while dishing it out to whoever is across from him. The Coffin Drop off the scaffold was effectively his last gambit, but he cracked his head on the table or the stage and when you add blood-loss to his existing physical state you kind of knew where it was going. As it wound down I found myself feeling deflated, not in the match itself but rather in the knowledge that the run was coming to an end. I thought the payoff was great, the finish devastating as both the proverbial nail in the coffin as well as the physical, precisely BECAUSE it left me deflated. I wanted my boy to win, to continue the reign, continue taking on all comers. None of that happened and I was gutted. And that's kind of the whole point, isn't it? Even to a jaded old prick like me, that's kind of the point.
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