There it was in two main events, in a little less than a half-hour of action, the full aesthetic spectrum of mixed martial arts, alpha to omega.
Whether those looking on liked some of it or all of it, whether those not looking on will ever like any of it, are questions of taste.
Until the big show began, until Frank Mir and Shane Carwin stepped into the octagon at the Prudential Center to contest the Ultimate Fighting Championship's interim heavyweight title on Saturday night, and then Georges St-Pierre put his welterweight title on the line against Dan Hardy, there really wasn't much to appreciate one way or another.
The folks who run the UFC do their best not to test short attention spans. On every show, they stage a slew of bouts, many of them before the television cameras come on - this show lasted more than five hours - and all of them are accompanied by pounding music, slick video introductions, and occasionally the bellowing postfight interview stylings of comedian Joe Rogan.
In other words, if you don't like something, just wait a second - yet still, several times as the undercard wore on, and fighters were locked in uninteresting stalemates, the fancy began to chant "Boring, boring."
They didn't do that when the big fellows stepped in. Mir and Carwin, two mountainous chaps, were fighting for the right to take on the former professional wrestler Brock Lesnar, the UFC's reigning heavyweight champion, temporarily laid low by health concerns (Lesnar was stricken while in Canada, and offered a memorable critique of how he felt the system here had let him down). The cognoscenti called it a pick 'em fight, but in the end it was no contest: Carwin, from Denver, who is undefeated in his MMA career, began by kicking repeatedly at one of Mir's knees, which was wrapped in an elastic brace. Then he began to punch him in the head with uppercuts. Mir buckled, fell to the canvas, and Carwin kept right on striking. He was finally pulled off with Mir lying face down, absorbing shots to the side of the head. (Lesnar walked into the ring afterward and made good use of some of the on-the-mike skills he picked up in the WWE: "That's a make-believe belt," he said of the bejewelled strap around Carwin's waist.)
No grappling. No ground work at all. A kick-and-fist fight, and a knockout. The crowd ate it up.
What St-Pierre delivered seemed by contrast like something one might see depicted on a Grecian urn - or at least one might if the ancients wore Mohawks died bright red like a rooster's comb, as Hardy does.
There's little argument that the Montreal fighter is, pound-for-pound, the most talented athlete in the sport, which is why he entered the bout as a prohibitive favourite over Hardy, a tough Englishman who has been on a winning streak, and has a gift for trash talk - always delivered with a wink and smile.
Hardy's one chance was to try to sucker St-Pierre into standing up and trading punches, a situation in which their abilities might be relatively equal. But in each round, after a few seconds of that, St-Pierre used his remarkable speed to take Hardy down, where he dominated him on the mat. But for all of his skill, for all of his technical chops, St-Pierre couldn't penetrate Hardy's guard long enough to pound him into submission, and he couldn't execute the submission hold that might have forced him to quit.
But he was close. In the first round, St-Pierre seemed to lock in an arm bar, and in the fourth, he snared Hardy in a kimura, both holds that, applied by someone of his ability, would normally have resulted in a "tap out" - the alternative being a broken or dislocated limb. Elements of the crowd were all for the latter ("Break it! Break it!", they hollered), but the arm didn't break and Hardy didn't quit. "I don't know the meaning of tap," he said later.
("I think he must be made of rubber," St-Pierre said afterward.)
Hardy survived both close encounters, the fight went to a decision, and not surprisingly, St-Pierre won a lopsided verdict on all three cards.
"It's a win," St-Pierre said. "But I'm not very happy with myself. I made a lot of stupid mistakes.
"He's a lot better than I thought he was. I just want to apologize to my fans. I will come back better next time. I'm very sorry."
No sign of anyone asking for his or her money back.