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Happiness #1: Wrestlemania Becomes YES!-tlemania
Like the Benoit-Guerrero moment, this was one that seemed doomed to be a bittersweet memory, until Daniel Bryan's 2018 return to in-ring competition told fans that we may someday see a repeat of The Goat's heartwarming triumph.
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Daniel Bryan conquered a lack of front office faith and the label of "B+ Player," good enough to sell tickets but not good enough to carry the show, to earn a match with WWE Chief Operating Officer Triple H, with the winner making Wrestlemania XXX's main event a Triple Threat Match for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship.
Teasing fans over the course of 25 minutes (which, reportedly, was over time, leading to the absurdly quick Shield vs. The Authority match) with constant suggestions that WWE would continue to beat down the man many in the WWE Universe saw as their in-ring representative, Bryan would triumph with a flying knee before suffering a brutal post-match attack by The Game.
His shoulder severely injured (in storyline), Bryan would enter the main event tired and targeted, seemingly carried out on a stretcher halfway through. The leader of the YES! Movement would fight through injury, crooked officiating, and being overmatched by larger and fresher competitors to force Batista to tap to the YES! Lock (a neat callback to Bryan's NXT days where he took Batista to the limit but came up short).
The confetti shower that followed is a fandom-defining moment for many; Bryan forgets to sell his allegedly injured shoulder, but that's forgivable in the emotion of the moment. Also in his autobiography, Bryan notes that his soon-to-be-wife Brie Bella was not allowed to come to the ring to celebrate, which dampened the mood slightly for him, but let fans soak up the image of the unlikeliest of heroes holding wrestling's biggest prize.
