If you were watching Saturday’s UFC 205 pay-per-view broadcast, you heard her voice drift in over the background noise, almost an after-thought, a polite interruption disrupting the usual flow.

Excuse her, if you don’t mind, but Miesha Tate will be retiring now, and she just wanted you to know. Anyway, so long and thanks for watching.

So that’s how it ends for Tate (18-7 MMA, 5-4 UFC) after nine years and 25 professional fights. The woman who started out at a college MMA club, training alongside the man who’d become her boyfriend and coach and confidant, now says that a unanimous-decision loss to Raquel Pennington (9-5 MMA, 6-2 UFC) at Madison Square Garden in New York convinced her that she doesn’t have it anymore.

“I had a lot more to give, but I couldn’t pull it out of myself,” Tate told UFC commentator Joe Rogan immediately after the fight. “It’s been a long time. I’ve taken a lot of punishment. I still love this sport. I love you guys so much, thank you, but that’s it for me.”

Just listening to her voice, that nasal pinch that comes from either a broken nose or the world’s worst cold, it was hard to disagree about the punishment.

Tate’s taken a lot of beatings for a fighter with only two knockout losses on her record. Part of that was her style. She approached this sport like someone trying to chop down a tree with a sledgehammer. She grinded and absorbed and overcame. She won ugly. She won the fights she really should have lost. In this way, she became a champion, both in Strikeforce and the UFC.

That’ll be part of her legacy, because how could it not? But pointing out that she briefly held two important titles and never successfully defended either doesn’t tell the whole story.

What Tate was for women’s MMA was a bridge between eras. She grew up in and with this sport, beginning at a time when you had to be crazy to want to be a female professional fighter in the first place. The money wasn’t great even for the men back then. For the women the paydays were more like a courtesy. People wanted the women to be grateful for getting a chance to fight at all, and most of the time they were.

You know those fighters who like to claim that they either love this sport or hate some specific opponent enough that they’d step in the cage for free? In women’s MMA, especially back when Tate started, that was pretty much standard operating procedure. Once you factored in training expenses, time away from whatever your real job was, plus taxes and management fees, a lot of those warriors in sports bras were paying to play in this sport.

Tate obviously wasn’t the only one, but she was one of the few who stuck around long enough to see it all change.

I remember talking to Tate in 2010, a year she went 4-0 in Strikeforce and ended up with, by her estimate, around $15,000 – including what she made from sponsors.

She might have hoped that six years later she’d be headlining UFC 200 with the UFC women’s bantamweight title around her waist, but there was no good reason at the time to think that was even possible, since UFC President Dana White was still publicly insisting that women would “never” fight in the UFC.

Ronda Rousey gets credit for changing his mind, but people forget that Tate was her perfect foil for their breakthrough Strikeforce fight. In Showtime promos they were enemies in evening gowns, both of them selling good looks and violent hatred for one another, and hooking some new fans in the process.

Rousey won that fight by treating Tate’s arm like a twist-tie, and the year after that the UFC had its first women’s division. Tate quickly became a staple in that weight class, fighting eight times in three years and never falling far from the top. She was a name the UFC could depend on, one of the only female fighters not named Ronda Rousey who fans still cared about.

And now it’s over. After opening the pay-per-view portion of the show in what may prove to be the biggest UFC event so far, Tate lost a fight in which she often looked stiff and uncomfortable, like someone who couldn’t get herself out of second gear but wasn’t going to quit trying. After that, she told us she was through.

Just a moment on the broadcast. Here and then gone and buried in our memories by all the action that came after it. Hopefully Tate’s career, and her contributions to the women’s side of the sport, don’t suffer the same fate.

For more on UFC 205, check out the UFC Events section of the site.