There’s a moment that haunts me. March 31st, 2015. Daniel Bryan stands up outside the ring after being beaten senseless by Sheamus, a trickle of blood coming from his forehead. He looks like a ghost, held upright by the sheer willpower of his heart and gut. Bad News Barrett gets up from the commentary table and slams him in the head with the Bullhammer, an elbow strike that’s known to put his opponents down for a three count.

Bryan stays down longer than that, convulsing on the ground after the hit, and gets counted out. At the time I marveled in the beauty of this amazing shot, with Daniel Bryan selling the beatdown so well that I can’t help but believe it, just to get taken out for good by the man coming after his Intercontinental Championship. What a wonderful job it’s done of making a returning Sheamus look like a monster, making Barrett look like a cruel opportunist, and making Bryan look vulnerable without having to eat a pinfall.

I thought about this moment again and again in the next few weeks, unable to get past a rare perfect moment of storytelling in wrestling, one that filled me with that perfect strain of joy only wrestling gives you. I held it high in my brain, putting it on a pedestal as a monument to my adoration for what Bryan has done in WWE, overcoming all odds to become one of the biggest grassroots heroes the company has ever seen despite him not fitting the mold.

The pedestal came crashing down two weeks later, when news sites shared the speculation that Daniel Bryan has been removed from upcoming shows after suffering a concussion in that match with Sheamus. I found the situation horrifying, but I was happy to see that WWE was doing their part to protect him so he could get another chance to be the megastar we all saw in him.

To WWE’s credit, they seemed to know what they had in Daniel Bryan from the beginning, despite handling it in the most WWE way possible. His first televised match with the company in 2010 was a strong showing against Chris Jericho while Y2J was World Champion. And in retrospect, pairing one of the consensus best wrestlers in the world with the fucking Miz as his coach was an inspired way to build crowd support during his NXT run, but then they WWE’d it by having him lose every single match he wrestled on the show, with the announcers constantly harping on Bryan being a vegan nerd who can’t cut a promo.

Bryan was released soon after, due to an unfortunate overstepping of boundaries on live TV, and it seemed like a great opportunity had vanished. But by year’s end, Bryan returned as a hero in the main event of Summerslam, feuded with the Miz to become United States Champion, and even found himself in a mentor role in a later season of NXT.

On paper, the years that followed continued to be magnificent. He became World Heavyweight Champion, and it turned him into a pissy, paranoid little baby man. It ruled, and when he lost the title in 18 seconds the crowd didn’t treat it as comeuppance for a little bitch heel to the big strong cool guy. They hijacked an hour of Wrestlemania by chanting Daniel Bryan’s name during the next few matches.

He unexpectedly became the funniest part of the show in a tag team with Kane, and it did the impossible by injecting heart and joy into A TAG TEAM WITH KANE. Bryan reached Mick Foley levels of crowd connection, to the point where no matter what WWE did with Bryan, the crowd would demand more.

But no matter how high Bryan got to fly, his support within WWE was always marked with an asterisk. “Yes he’s a top guy, but not really.” They spent years using our love for Bryan to try to make us hate their favorite heels. Fair play, but it’s amazing how much WWE didn’t seem to appreciate just how special Bryan was to their fans. He never seemed to get to be “the guy,” to the point where it became the overarching story of the company for years, and caused fans to knee-jerk hate anyone WWE pushed as a result.

Daniel Bryan would win championships and be screwed out of them. When fans were rabid to see Bryan win the Royal Rumble and have his Wrestlemania moment, WWE didn’t even put him in the match. And cruelly, when fan support was so strong that winning the big one at Wrestlemania happened anyway, the run turned into dust when Bryan got injured soon after.

There was a real sense as a fan, or at least to this fan, that WWE squandered their time with Daniel Bryan. If you don’t strike when the iron is hot, sometimes you don’t get another chance. Bryan came back into the fold looking to win the Intercontinental Championship, and it wasn’t enough for me. It wasn’t enough for this man who saw his dream come true and crumble to come back fighting to be anything but the best. The time he was injured made it clear that our time with him was precious. What if he got hurt again?

Daniel Bryan wouldn’t win the WWE championship again before he was forced to retire in early 2016, about ten months after that match with Sheamus. It wasn’t just concussions, but the seizures that followed, caused by a small lesion on his brain. I hadn’t fully made the connection until reading these facts; one of my favorite moments in wrestling in the past year was actually me bearing witness to a strike that ended the career of my hero. The convulsions weren’t part of the story; they were a medical emergency. Daniel Bryan’s dream ended in that instant, and I couldn’t have been happier to be watching it.

There’s a moment that haunts me. Not just that I watched a truly once-in-a-lifetime performer cut short in his prime, but that in the moment I celebrated it. I have never felt more ghoulish in my lifetime than I did once I had the context for the mistake I had made. Something that was so beautiful to me, in an instant, became a nightmare.

You know the rest of the story. This was not Daniel Bryan’s final match. The dream did not truly die that day. My soul no longer needs to carry the full weight of this sin. But it has helped me to appreciate every day I get to see Bryan Danielson wrestle, the sheer miracle of his continued existence in my life. I am humbled by his abilities as a performer, his grace as a human being, and beyond grateful that he gets to end his career on his own terms later this year to commit to his other life’s passion: being a father.

I will not forget the lesson taught to me that day. Every match is a gift. And here but for the grace of Bryan go I.