Okay, so unpopular opinion time: Sting should have lost his final match.

He should have, because everyone should. There’s an entire phrase for it. You go out on your back. You put someone over on your way out the door. And Sting apparently wanted to do that, but Tony Khan fought against him and ultimately convinced him to retire a champion, undefeated in 28 matches in AEW. That’s because Tony Khan is a mark. And that’s fine. The live crowd in Greensboro certainly enjoyed Sting winning, as did many, many people watching at home. And normally we’d say something like “if pure sentimentality was the goal here, which it clearly was, then it was the right choice, mission accomplished.”

Only it doesn’t take creativity to generate sentiment. As Revolution proved, if you know what notes to play on fans’ nostalgia, they’ll forgive you anything. If you loved Sting and you loved this send-off, that’s fantastic. But from a creative standpoint, Sting’s victory is a disastrous missed opportunity. Those first 27 AEW wins represented an build-up of equity, like a savings account being built up to be passed down to your children. Now, the kids get nothing. That equity is gone, and nobody is any better for it. The Young Bucks would not have been our first picks to receive that equity, and they didn’t exactly need it, but they could have benefitted from it. Imagine Wednesday’s “Dynamite” if the Bucks had swaggered out to the ring to make their announcements, tag team title belts over their shoulders, confident in the knowledge that they retired Sting, that they are the only people who will ever be able to say they defeated Sting in AEW — and then Kazuchika Okada came out and joined them? They would be the biggest heel group on AEW programming, easily. Instead, Nick Jackson cut a whiny promo about how Sting cheated to beat them, and when he triumphantly shouted that “We ended Sting’s career forever!” it felt completely hollow. They didn’t end anything — they couldn’t beat a 60-year-old man in what amounted to a handicap match and then he decided to leave on his own. If the idea is for the Bucks to be whiny heels with big mouths who can’t back it up, fine, but we have to think their programs would be more lucrative if they felt in any way like a threat.

As for the finish itself, it was an utterly ridiculous sequence that involved Sting kicking out of multiple finishers, even at one. It wasn’t enough that the Bucks couldn’t beat him — he had to be made to look like a superhero. To do all that purely in the name of nostalgia is asinine, and it would have been far more respectful to let Sting go out the way all wrestlers go out, in accordance with his own wishes. This match, sad to say, felt like it was more about Tony Khan than it was about Sting. It set nothing up, it advanced no story, it elevated no one except the guy leaving. Again, it seemed like that was the intent, and it’s okay if you loved it, but you can’t objectively call it good booking. It was the exact opposite. AEW only had one chance to get this one right, and they missed it.

Grade: F-