Sunday!

We’re building up to the Grandaddy of them all: WrestleMania XXXIV.

This is a show that I look forward to every year the way that other folks (co-workers, for example) look forward to the Superbowl.

We get wings. Not just wings from the place around the corner, either. We go to the *GOOD* wing place that you have to drive out of your way to get to. We get the premium sides. We spend the extra money to buy the beer that has umlauts in the name. When shopping for finger foods, we don’t bother with the “do we get X or do we get Y?”, we grab X and we grab Y and we pick up a Z and Aleph for good measure. We talk to peoples’ private physicians and get letters that say that it’s okay for them to abandon their diets for this one sporting event. In the case of WrestleMania happening before Easter (and, thus, in the middle of Lent), we hammer out that breaking fast during WrestleMania doesn’t count.

This is the big one.

WrestleMania week is usually a cacophonous mess with all kinds of last-minute hard-sells of the PPV mixed in with candy-coated nostalgia for past WrestleManias. Much like the Superbowl, it’s one of those things where you pretty much acknowledge that the game itself isn’t particularly likely to be the best one of the year but it’s not about the game. It’s about the game about the game.

So what can you expect to see next week?

13 matches. Well, 3 or 4 of those will be on the pre-show. So 9 or 10 matches. Here’s how Wikipedia has them listed (and they start from the top of the card):

Brock Lesnar (c) (with Paul Heyman) vs. Roman Reigns

AJ Styles (c) vs. Shinsuke Nakamura

The Miz (c) vs. Seth Rollins vs. Finn Bálor

Randy Orton (c) vs. Bobby Roode vs. Jinder Mahal vs. Rusev

Alexa Bliss (c) vs. Nia Jax

Charlotte Flair (c) vs. Asuka

Cesaro and Sheamus (c) vs. Braun Strowman and TBD

The Usos (Jey and Jimmy Uso) (c) vs. The New Day (Big E, Kofi Kingston, and/or Xavier Woods) vs. The Bludgeon Brothers (Harper and Rowan)

Cedric Alexander vs. Mustafa Ali

Kurt Angle and Ronda Rousey vs. Triple H and Stephanie McMahon

Daniel Bryan and Shane McMahon vs. Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn

WrestleMania Women’s Battle Royal

André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal

Holy cow, that’s a lot of matches. (And a lot of spots for a whole lot of people on the roster to participate and get their cut of the WM34 royalties.)

The weird thing is that the hype still works… I look at that card and think “man, they outdid themselves this year…” as if I didn’t think that last year. Or the year before. Or the year before.

So… what are you reading and/or watching? (Or getting unbelievably hyped for read and/or watching?)