Of the many well-documented reasons for boxing’s protracted retreat toward the periphery of the mainstream, the lack of clearly identifiable champions rates high on a competitive list. At one time the heavyweight championship of the world was the most prestigious title in sports, yet boxing’s lack of central authority has left us with four major sanctioning bodies that have served to create confusion among casual observers while devaluing the currency of a title.

Only five and a half months ago, the sport’s bellwether division appeared on the cusp of a new dawn when two of the big men with legitimate claims to the title of world’s best heavyweight fought to a white-knuckle split draw in downtown Los Angeles punctuated by a meme-friendly climax straight out of a Rocky movie. Deontay Wilder kept the WBC’s version of the long-fractured heavyweight title he’s owned since 2015. Tyson Fury retained his stake to the lineal championship he earned when he ended Wladimir Klitschko’s decade-long reign the same year. And Anthony Joshua, the Olympic gold medalist who’s consolidated the WBA, WBO and IBF belts to boffo box-office numbers, abruptly dropped from the most comfortably perched of the trio to, one could reasonably argue, the least.

The spark had been lit and at last the stage was set for the division’s big cats to spend the next couple of years engaged in one of the most compelling three-way rivalries on record – a round robin of superfights to produce the first undisputed heavyweight champion since Lennox Lewis nearly two decades ago.

Yet boxing stays boxing and the numbingly familiar bugaboos of money and politics and other competing interests have conspired to keep Wilder, Fury and Joshua apart with the assignment of blame resembling a Mexican standoff. Call it the lost heavyweight season. All three will climb through the ropes in the next month against opponents they’re likely to beat, lining the coffers of the fighters, their handlers and the network executives at the expense of the biggest prize.

Wilder (40-0-1, 39 KOs) kicks it off on Saturday night at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center against Dominic Breazeale, the WBC’s mandatory contender and fellow US Olympian, in the most competitive piece of the triptych. The former college quarterback is coming off three straight victories since his lone career setback, a seventh-round stoppage loss to Joshua, and enters as a 5-1 underdog, albeit a live one by virtue of his formidable power.

There’s no good reason Wilder, the charismatic knockout machine in a chiseled 6ft 7in, 220lb package, shouldn’t be riding the momentum from December’s gripping tangle with Fury into an immediate rematch or long-awaited showdown with Joshua in the biggest fight that can be made today. Instead the 33-year-old Alabama native, who’s aligned with Al Haymon and turned down $100m for three fights on DAZN to remain with Showtime, has been reduced to ginning up interest in Saturday’s matchup by doubling down on his desire to kill his opponent, a cynical stroke of salesmanship at odds with the consummate sportsman he’s always been in private moments.

Joshua (22-0, 21 KOs), the 29-year-old from Watford who’s tethered to DAZN and Sky Sports, takes his turn across the East River in two weeks when he makes his US debut against Andy Ruiz Jr, a replacement opponent dialled in when the Brooklyn slugger Jarrell Miller failed no fewer than three tests for different performance-enhancing drugs shortly after the match-up was announced. The 1 June event at Madison Square Garden will no doubt be a rollocking occasion after Joshua’s run of money-spinning stadium sell-outs back home. Far less certain is whether Ruiz, who fought only last month and whose concessions in height (four inches) and reach (eight) account for the 10-1 odds against him, will offer much competitive resistance.

Anthony Joshua tapes his hands up prior to a training session in Sheffield earlier this month. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty Images

Fury (27-0-1, 19 KOs), the awkward operator who effectively dashed any hope of an immediate rematch with Wilder in February when he signed with a co-promotional deal with Top Rank Promotions (and ESPN by extension), is fighting someone named Tom Schwarz, an unheralded German priced at 15-1, on the Las Vegas strip on 15 June. The 30-year-old Gypsy King’s improbable rebound from a very public bout with mental illness, which led to him ceding all his belts as he ballooned from 260lbs to nearly 400lbs during a 31-month layoff, has earned him more leeway with fight fans, but their patience will run thin rapidly.

The reality so often obscured by nostalgia is the sport’s chattering class has bemoaned the dearth of great heavyweights in almost every era of boxing, which only puts a fine point on the urgency of the present moment: Three prime, unbeaten champions each 6ft 6in or taller, each with power and skill to burn and each just flawed enough in specific ways to all but guarantee crowd-pleasing encounters. There would be knockdowns. There would be excitement. Would that it were so. Such is the tragicomic funhouse logic of this sport: where the closer we approach the sorely needed clarity of a singular champion, the farther it seems we drift.