The long shadow of a ten-minute tag match

Every now and then, the internet decides to exhume a moment from 2019 and treat it like an unsolved murder mystery. This week, Brian Myers discussing his WrestleMania 35 victory has set the forums on fire. For the uninitiated, Myers and Curt Hawkins ended a legendary losing streak by pinning The Revival to capture the Raw Tag Team Championships. People are currently debating whether this was a feel-good masterpiece or a symptom of a booking department that had completely checked out.

The enthusiasts are loud today. They argue that this match was the perfect payoff to a storyline that lasted nearly two years. You cannot deny the pop from that New Jersey crowd when the referee counted to three. It gave Hawkins and Myers a legitimate career highlight after spending years in the doghouse of the undercard. Without that 1 win, they were just bodies fillling space. With it, they were etched into the history books.

The skeptics are dragging the booking

Then you have the miserable lot who view everything through a lens of cynicism. They argue that the title change meant absolutely nothing because the belts were treated like decorative accessories anyway. One user on the boards pointed out that The Revival looked like absolute chumps, going from NXT workhorses to eating a loss on the biggest stage to guys who hadn’t won a match in ages. It is hard to argue with that perspective given the trajectory of those teams afterward.

There is a recurring argument that Vince McMahon only signed off on the win because he decided to treat the tag titles as a prop for a punchline. If the champions do not defend the belts with any frequency or gravitas, does the win actually matter? Most of the people in this camp think the answer is a resounding no. They see the WrestleMania 35 finish as the moment Tag Team wrestling officially hit rock bottom under the old regime.

Finding the truth between the extremes

My take? Both sides are missing the mark by focusing entirely on the long-term fallout rather than the moment itself. Was it a technical masterpiece? No, it was a standard TV-style match forced into a stadium show. Did it accomplish exactly what it needed to for the audience in the building? Absolutely. Sometimes, you just need a popcorn finish that plays on the irony of a losing streak.

However, we have to address the elephant in the room regarding the lack of follow-through. The biggest sin of the McMahon era wasn't having bad ideas; it was consistently failing to capitalize on the ones that actually popped in real-time. If you are going to invest two years into a losing streak storyline, the follow-up cannot be a title reign that essentially vanishes into the ether. It feels like the company got its laugh and then walked away from the table.

Why fans just cannot let it go

Why do we talk about this specific moment five years later? Because it encapsulates the weird, disjointed nature of the 2019 touring schedule. You had moments of pure, unadulterated sports entertainment bliss sitting right next to booking decisions that looked like they were made during a commercial break. The internet loves to debate this because it reflects our own fragmented relationship with the product during that messy transition period.

It is easy to roast the company for treating the titles as a joke, but I have a soft spot for the absurdity of the whole thing. Myers and Hawkins leaned into the losing streak with a level of commitment that almost no one else on the roster matched. If you want to argue about the merits of the booking, look at the 15 minutes they were given. That is where they should have shown they belonged in that spot.

Ultimately, the match serves as a strange monument to a bygone era of booking. It was efficient, it was self-aware, and it was entirely fleeting. You can hold it up as a triumph of storytelling or a failure of depth. Just do not sit there and pretend it did not make the crowd scream. In the business of professional wrestling, that is usually the only currency that actually spends.

The fact that people are still dissecting this in 2026 says more about the void left by that specific style of tag booking than it does about the actual match. We are all just waiting for tag team divisions to feel like they matter again, hoping for something more permanent than a 2019 flash-in-the-pan. One day we might get a WrestleMania tag match that actually defines a year, but for now, we are stuck debating this relic of a lost decade.