It started at 10:30 a.m. here in the Mountain time zone. A bright May morning. Birds chirping, lawnmowers whirring, sprinklers sprinkling, and UFC Fight Pass blaring out a greeting all the way from Berlin, where the journey was just beginning.

Roughly 12 hours later it was over, and yet I felt I had aged at least a year, maybe more.

Two UFC events on two separate continents. Twenty-two total fights. Four on-air commentators. Two ring announcers. One canvas sent to the wrong hemisphere. A hazy, indistinguishable mass of octagon girls blowing kisses and batting eyelashes.

Then it ended all at once, in a 35-second drubbing that reminded us why the MMA gods, in their infinite wisdom, created weight classes.

History had been made, in a way, but we were mostly too bleary-eyed and strung out on Linkin Park promo spots to know whether that was a good or a bad thing.

I got my fill of flawed comparisons leading up to this two-event day. It was no different than a baseball doubleheader, people said. It was March Madness for MMA fans. It was a weekend golf tournament. It was whatever the hell they call those endless cricket matches.

Trouble is, a baseball doubleheader takes literally half as long, March Madness is spread out over a much longer time frame and with more immediately meaningful stakes, golf is boring no matter how long it takes, and I’m still not convinced that cricket is a real thing.

If I was going to compare this long day of UFC to anything, it’d be one of those all-day music festivals. You show up to see two or three bands that you know and like, a handful of others that you vaguely recognize, and somewhere in there maybe you’re introduced to a few more you’d never even heard of. By the end you leave too exhausted to be drunk, too sunburned to smile, and you think you had fun but at the same time it’s all kind of a blur.

Yeah, this was like that, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s probably a much better thing than we had any right to expect, especially considering how recent weeks have reminded us that sometimes one UFC event is a long enough slog by itself.

UFC Fight Night 41 was the better of the two lineups, and it delivered everything we could have hoped for. We saw breakout performances from the likes of Nicklas Backstrom (who may or may not have been “yoking” about post-fight plans with his girlfriend) and Nick Hein (who’s built exactly like what you’d expect when you hear the words “German judoka”). We got to see Gegard Mousasi absolutely school Mark Munoz in perhaps the best performance of his career, while C.B. Dollaway gave Francis Carmont a dose of his own medicine in between some truly Diaz-esque posturing amid a battle of mid-fight sneers.

By the time the event ended on that Mousasi-generated high note at roughly 2:30 p.m. (again, that’s in the one true time zone), I was surprised to find that I was definitely ready for more. Five hours later, when I heard Jon Anik utter the words “featured bout of the prelims” after several plodding efforts on the TUF Brazil 3 Finale undercard, my eyelids suddenly got a few pounds heavier.

But hey, we’d made it this far. And there was still the promise of a freakish “bloodbath” in the main event.

Yeah, about that. If this day of dueling events was the UFC’s Lollapalooza, the practically criminal mismatch between heavyweight Stipe Miocic and light heavyweight (who should really be a middleweight) Fabio Maldonado was like that year Metallica showed up with short hair to play their suckiest songs. It was a bad idea we had almost talked ourselves into supporting. Then it disintegrated into farce in record time.

What were they thinking with this fight, we wondered. What were any of us thinking when we shrugged it off as a questionable move but a decent plan B? Maldonado was pitched to us as a Brazilian Homer Simpson-type who’d give us our money’s worth in blood (most of it his, he acknowledged beforehand), and who knows, maybe even fire back a punch or two just to keep things interesting.

I guess we should be grateful that it didn’t go down that way. If it had, Maldonado might be in a coma right now rather than simply mired deep in a post-loss bummer. Maybe you can’t say that a trained fighter in four-ounce gloves is ever firmly in the Zero Chance Zone, but Maldonado was right next door to it. That much became clear immediately, and it was ugly.

As Miocic steamrolled his Brazilian opponent en route to a mercifully quick stoppage, you could almost feel the MMA world snapping back to reality. Oh right, that’s why we don’t do this.

Maybe every once in a while we need to try it just so we remember. Maybe it’s not so different with the UFC’s swipe at an all-day MMA doubleheader.

This wasn’t so much a viewing experience as it was an exercise in fandom. Part journey and part crucible, you lived this as much as you watched it. That is, assuming you accepted the challenge. Not that anyone could have blamed you for getting up to make a sandwich or just reconnect with the outside world for a while. Neither could we have blamed you if you liked that reconnection (or sandwich) so much that you didn’t come back, which is where the real risk lies for the UFC.

This day asked a lot from MMA fans, who already give a lot. It asked and then it asked some more. And even the world’s greatest fans must have their limits. Even they can only get so hardcore before they petrify in front of their computer screens some fine Saturday afternoon, with the outside world in full bloom all around them.

For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 41 and the TUF Brazil 3 Finale, check out the UFC Events section of the site.

(Pictured: Fabio Maldonado)