In the end, Justin Gaethje became the myth UFC Freedom 250 was trying to tell

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Four useless scorecards and seven bouts ago, UFC Freedom 250 delivered upon its promise to give America the right kind of birthday bash, leaving the 4,300 bystanders on the White House's South Lawn in a state of genuine awe.

>Justin Gaethje, the American headliner being fed to Ilia Topuria on a platter for entertainment purposes, perhaps embodied everything the UFC has been trying to convey over the past week about this nation's fighting spirit. Topuria stalked forward to give the military and each dignitary a display of fireworks, and Gaethje slammed the jab into his fine features while garnishing his face with uppercuts.

>Still, Topuria came forward, for it was for him alone to dictate terms. In the second round he began to light into Gaethje in ways no man should come back from. Powerful, snapping shots to the head. Beautiful rips to the body, as swift as scythe swings, as ruthless as a butcher, one after another. Gaethje winced and doubled over and sucked air, as Topuria tenderized his organs one blow at a time, treating him as nothing more than a lucid, blue-eyed heavy bag.

>Yet through the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting into his liver, something gave proof through the night that Gaethje was still there.

>In the third round, the whole thing changed in cinematic fashion. It was Gaethje firing into the Topuria onrush, slamming right hands into Topuria's face, landing shot after incredible shot, elbows and punches, until his face was spangled with blood. For a minute there, it didn't look like Topuria could answer the bell for the fourth round.

>Actually, for two minutes there, if we're being totally accurate.

>The medical examination was conflicted.

>Yet after pleading his case, the cageside doctor relented to let the Spaniard seek a more dignified ending. Instead, Gaethje hammered home the point. For a fighter who has been called everything from a berserker to an agent of chaos to nothing more than market variety mincemeat, this was his masterpiece. It was his pièce de résistance. Just as the New York Knicks did the night prior at the Alamo, this was his defiant stand to rewrite history.

>His own history, anyway.

>And it was a hellacious beating. The 6-to-1 favorite Topuria couldn't continue into the fifth round, as his corner called the fight. It wasn't the will of the doctors that ended it; it was that Gaethje sapped the will out of one of the sport's best pound-for-pound fighters on the ultimate home soil. It's in these details that you'll come to understand what is meant by the term "mettle."

>Afterward Gaethje stuck the backflip off the cage fence, but nearly broke his neck on the bonus flip carrying his momentum.

>"Hey, I'm from America, 250 years ago we were way bigger than 6-to-1 underdogs," he told Joe Rogan with two belts and a flag draped over his shoulders. "And look at us thriving now.

>"I prayed so much for this opportunity, to do something legendary, and I know that was absolutely legendary, because I cannot even believe it."

>Heading into the night, there was a lot of talk about the UFC's $60 million enterprise on the White House lawn. At the intersection of church and state was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the 92-foot "Claw." When Josh Hokit snuck in his tasteless barb about Michelle Obama after beating a disinterested Derrick Lewis, it gave ammunition to the most vocal critics of the event who saw it as a disgrace and a desecration. The political discourses kicked back up.

>Then Sean O'Malley scored a walk-off knockout of Aiemann Zahabi with the salute. If anything, it was representative of MMA as a whole — to go from an obnoxious moment straight into a poetic one, as there will always be plenty of both in this sport. Astonishment interrupts scrutiny in MMA as often as a teenager's voice cracks.

>As Ciryl Gane beat Alex Pereira for the interim heavyweight title in the co-main event, the narratives really began to blow up. If the UFC was hoping to see Pereira, arguably the company's biggest star, make history by winning a title in a third weight class, the better angels of the sport's nature intervened. It was Gane who arrived in the moment, bigger than life and defiant as hell.

>Those gathered didn't love the result, but that's the cruel nature of the sport. It simply won't adhere to the storylines being sought, and to love it is to accept it on those terms.

>What was sacrificed on Sunday night? Tomorrow, perhaps, we'll wonder about the longterm ramifications for the stars in the sport.

>Abraham Lincoln, of course, was a big part of the UFC's efforts to tell the story of America, one little vignette at a time between fights. And it was here, in the shadow of Lincoln's memorial, that we should also remember his words in the letter he penned to Mrs. Bixby during the Civil War, because the UFC laid "so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

>The sport's two biggest stars outside Conor McGregor lost in a single night, so that the UFC could host a one-time celebration on what was the president's 80th birthday. It was the tax paid on a bill that was already running to $60 million. In an event that was as polarizing as the sport itself has been traditionally, the UFC lived for the day, and not only the weather cooperated, so did the combatants.

>Dana White, who said that his brain was scrambled at the post-fight press conference, called Gaethje's opus, "one of the greatest fights you'll ever see." Maybe it was all worth it. In any case, it was definitely the right fight for the occasion, as it put into action everything the UFC has ever wanted to say.

>That is, in a sport dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, there is always that one who can dig deeper.