MJF vs. Adam Cole wasn’t just everything I wanted it to be. It was everything I needed it to be.

It’s been a hard week, y’all. I had to write the obituary for one of my favorite wrestlers on Thursday, and then I wrote about him again, and then again. I wasn’t exactly feeling in the pro wrestling spirit when All In kicked off Sunday morning (which could possibly account for some of my feelings on the undercard, as mentioned above). This PPV, for the most part, just washed over me without making me feel much of anything, and I was honestly a little worried by the time we got to the main. Would I be able to feel things in this amazing story that was so much about feelings? And even if I could, what feelings would those be? The eternal question — were they going to f*** this up?

And lo and behold, MJF and Adam Cole — and, yes, Tony Khan — delivered. They delivered in such an amazing way that I felt my passion for wrestling flood back into me as I absorbed what is, I think, the best AEW match I’ve ever seen.

I know there are some who would quibble with this. I’m already seeing conversations about how this storyline, as encapsulated by this match, feels more like WWE to some people than AEW. But for me (someone who, yes, tends to prefer WWE’s presentation of wrestling to AEW’s) this was an absolute masterpiece, built around the relationships between the characters as thoroughly as any Bloodline chapter. The surprisingly straightfoward ROH tag title win on the preshow (which I was not expecting). The match opening with your typical face vs. face mutual respect stuff before MJF crossed a line with Cole, who then began to work heel (I have never seen MJF as the babyface in a babyface vs. heel match and after this one I would very much like to see more of it). The brainbuster on the stairs, which caused Cole to recoil in horror at his own actions. The double clothesline poetically leading to a draw finish, and the callback to their first match allowing us to clearly and obviously see how MJF has grown and changed. The actual finish, in which what I thought was going to be a Cole heel turn transformed into something deeper — Cole making the choice to do right by his friend, and losing the match as a result. Every moment of this match served the story, and it should have. That’s what pro wrestling is.

And then after all that, it turned out they had reserved their best stuff for the post-match. After winning with a roll-up, MJF earnestly tries to comfort Cole, saying he just got lucky, reminding him they’re still tag champions. Cole, frustrated beyond belief, throws the tag title belt aside. At which point, MJF accuses Cole of doing all this for the world title (which is something many of us thought would turn out to be the case) and then, in one of my favorite moments in literal wrestling history, he tells Cole that if he wants the belt he can have it, and throws it at him.

One of my favorite matches ever is Sami Zayn vs. Adrian Neville (PAC) at “NXT” Takeover: R Evolution in 2014. One of the reasons I love that match is because that match proposes that some things are more important than winning the championship. It’s what I’ve wanted the Bloodline to do for ages now (and which they only kind of, retroactively did at SummerSlam and on the “SmackDown” that followed): Give me a babyface who understands that there are things more important than becoming world champion — not “NXT” Champion, world champion. I never in a million years expected Maxwell Jacob Friedman to be that babyface, but here we are. Mirroring their tag title loss to FTR, he turns his back on Cole and waits for the strike, accepting that the world really is as cold and friendless as he’d always suspected, but now unable to keeping living in a world like that. And then Cole hugs him instead.

There are many different ways for wrestling to be beautiful, but this one may have been unique. The question going into All In was, who would turn on who? And the answer is that nobody turned on anybody, because friendship and love are the most powerful forces in the world, and sometimes they really do overcome the forces of greed and selfishness. Is a turn (likely a Cole turn) still coming? Yes, I imagine it is. But ending the show like this, with that hug, was an amazing and fiercely brave choice on the part of AEW, and I will always be grateful to this match for shining that light into my soul at a time when I really needed it. The company as a whole doesn’t often do it for me, but when it comes to this particular story, I have never been more All In.