Hey! I’m talking to you, fool! Pay attention! There is no escape! No running away! You cannot ignore what will happen Sunday at Levi’s Stadium! You cannot! My prediction is, be there early!

Sorry. I am getting caught up in the frenzy.

WrestleMania, the planet’s biggest pro wrestling extravaganza, visits our neighborhood this weekend. This will include, in addition to the big outdoor show in Santa Clara, many other fine cultural events and shows across the South Bay. There will be lots of screaming, flash and wildly scripted mayhem. With exclamation points! In fact, it is almost impossible to write about WrestleMania without utilizing exclamation points!

But against all odds, I plan to give it a shot the rest of the way.

My mission for this column is to identify the most sincere moment of the upcoming WrestleMania weekend and reveal to readers where it might be found. I know that sounds like folly, considering all the hard work put in by the WWE people to create such believable unbelievability in their production package.

There is one event, though, where I do believe the emotion is 99 percent genuine. Saturday night at SAP Center in downtown San Jose, the WWE Hall of Fame induction ceremonies will take place.

This year, the most renowned inductee will be Randy “Macho Man” Savage, who died in 2011 at age 58 of cardiac arrhythmia. If you followed pro wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Savage was inescapable, what with his outer-space outfits and gravel-voiced interviews. Savage was a member of the famous Poffo wrestling family, so most assumed that his brother, Lanny Poffo, would accept Saturday’s honor. Instead, Lanny asked Hulk Hogan to make Savage’s induction speech.

Hogan agreed to a phone interview with me about Savage. Several times, the Hulkster broke character to talk about how difficult Saturday night was going to be for him. Hogan and Savage had a complicated in-and-out-of-the-ring relationship, as wrestling rivals and friends.

“I told his brother Lanny that I felt he was the one who should be doing this,” Hogan said. “And Lanny said, ‘No, no, no. It needs to be you.’ I’m going to do my best to be the Hulk Hogan game-face guy. But lately, I’ve had a hard time with a lot of close friends who have left us. I know there will be some emotion. This is a great time for Randy. And it needs to be done right. I really want this to be good for his fans and his family. I want to let people know what a professional he was.”

Anyone who watches mainstream sports today surely notices how much they have been influenced by the staging first introduced by the WWE some 30 years ago — theme music for individual athletes, pyrotechnic introductions, Jumbotron scoreboard videos. Richard Sherman, the Seattle Seahawks cornerback, has outright copped the pro wrestling interview technique. But no one was more theatrical back in the day than Savage with his “Macho Man” persona.

Hogan wants people to realize how much preparation Savage also put into his ring performances, especially when their “rivalry” was at its peak.

“Randy was just so intense,” Hogan said. “I’d be asleep at 4 a.m. and the phone would ring and it would be Randy. He’d have an idea about something and say, ‘We need to take this to next level with a second elbow drop,” and would want to talk about how to do that. He wanted to take it farther and farther creatively and athletically. He lived it 24-7.”

There’s someone else in town this week who can vouch for that. Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat is always linked with Savage because of their 1987 meeting at WrestleMania III, often called the best WrestleMania match of all time. The Silverdome outside Detroit was filled to the gills with an announced crowd of more than 90,000. The main event paired Hogan against Andre the Giant. Savage and Steamboat were on the undercard.

“I give 100 percent credit to Hogan and Andre for the ticket and pay-per-view numbers,” Steamboat said in his own phone interview with me. “Randy and I wanted to take advantage of those eyeballs. A month before, we started talking about our match by saying, ‘Let’s be different.’ It never crossed our minds that we were going to do something people would remember all these years later. We just wanted to go at each other like a couple of bulls and not stop until we got the final result.”

You may consult YouTube for what occurred next. The legendary Savage-Steamboat match featured 22 false finishes — where one man appeared to be pinned but then miraculously kicked out before the referee could complete the three count — and all sorts of over-the-ropes chaos that the crowd ate up. Steamboat won the match. But both he and Savage earned their peers’ plaudits at the post-show reception.

“The other guys kept coming up and congratulating us,” Steamboat said. “I remember Gorilla Monsoon patting us on the back and telling us we really did good, did something special.”

When you please the Gorilla, you know that you’ve succeeded.

Steamboat and Savage’s careers eventually took them in different directions. But they’ll always have Pontiac. Steamboat now wishes they had reconnected more often to reminisce before Savage’s death. Steamboat said that when he drives to his workout gym in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area, he often passes the tree where Savage’s SUV crashed after he suffered his arrhythmia while behind the wheel.

“I’ve stopped there and pulled over to think about it all,” Steamboat said. “The tree usually has flowers at the base.”

Hogan last saw Savage two weeks before his death. One afternoon, the phone rang at Hogan’s house and Jimmy Hart, another former WWE performer and friend, was on the line with the bad news. Together, they pondered Savage’s legacy.

“If you are cutting through all the fat,” Hogan said, “Randy was a guy who, as a sports entertainer, was everything a sports entertainer should be. He lived this game. He set the bar for what it took to be at the top tier.”

Like Hogan, I am not certain what the Macho Man would say if he could be there Saturday night. But in looking for sincerity amid WrestleMania … well, I do believe that I accomplished my mission. With no exclamation points.

Read Mark Purdy’s blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/purdy. Contact him at mpurdy@mercurynews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/MercPurdy.