On Saturday, April 25, it will be exactly 26 years since I attended my first live wrestling event, where I saw David Arquette win the World Heavyweight Championship at an infamous taping of “WCW Thunder.” And now, here I am, a quarter-of-a-century later, planning a wedding a thousand miles away, watching another wrestling event taped in the Syracuse War Memorial, where I used to attend the Syracuse Auto Expo with my classic-car-obsessed father, now named for the hospital where I spent many days as a chronically-ill child, in the shadow of the Equitable Towers where I learned what grown-ups do at work, next to the Civic Center where I used to take acting classes, across the street from the convention center where I graduated high school, and just a short drive from the synagogue where I was Bar Mitzvah’d, that is now being turned into student housing. One friend I attended that “Thunder” taping with died in a professional snowmobile race, speeding into a wall, crashing into oblivion on Kentucky Derby Day, many years ago.

All of these ghosts came flooding back to me in a Proustian rush of memory throughout the show, as Mike Santana made a Jey Uso-esque entrance through hallways that I haven’t walked in at least 15 years.

I saw one WCW taping and two WWE house shows in that arena, and none of them were as good as what “Impact” presented tonight. WCW in 2000 was in a sorry state of affairs, and WWE never really took Syracuse audiences seriously in my time as a wrestling fan, often phoning it in and working on spots for TV and PPV. So I can firmly say that tonight’s “Impact,” as boilerplate as it might’ve been, was the best wrestling I’ve ever seen in the War Memorial at OnCenter.

It was weird to see Syracuse taken so seriously. TNA might’ve taken the city more seriously in these couple of days of tapings than I did in my whole 18 years there. There was a shoutout to Upstate NY favorite, Dinosaur BBQ, and numerous references to the city being a dump, which it is, but it was my dump for a while; the dump that made me the man I am today.

I’m not even the usual “Impact” editor. I just happened to be filling in.

Call it “fate,” call it “God,” call it “providence,” I was probably meant to see this show and realize how far that little 9-year-old WCW fan, who plugged his ears before every pyro burst, has come.

In the introductions, I usually say we’re going to get “deep in our feelings” about the show, and boy howdy was I telling the truth with this one.

Written by Ross Berman