There’s a reason Natalya has recently been watching plenty of matches between Bret “The Hitman” Hart and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.

One in particular — the pair’s legendary submission match at WrestleMania 13 — has piqued the interest of Hart’s niece as she gets ready for her encounter with Becky Lynch at SummerSlam.

“I feel like myself versus Becky has shades of Bret Hart versus Steve Austin,” Natalya said in a phone interview.

On last week’s “Monday Night Raw,” she challenged Lynch to a submission match of their own, pitting her Sharpshooter versus the Raw women’s champion’s Disarm-her. WWE announced a week later that it would indeed be a submission match for Lynch’s championship at SummerSlam in Toronto on Aug. 11 (7 p.m., WWE Network).

Natalya sees the dynamic between the two as similar to the one Austin and Hart shared in 1997. Lynch is the brash, take-no-prisoners upstart and her opponent the technician who stands up for what she believes in. There was an instant connection.

“[Hart and Austin] were so gritty, but there [was] still a lot of room for great technical aspects to that match,” Natalya said. “I loved how they fought in the crowd. I loved how [Austin] showed that perseverance that Becky has. … I feel like I’m very inspired watching that match.”

When Natalya gets in the squared circle with Lynch, a number of personal storylines will be converging. The match takes place in her native Canada, just two days prior to the one-year anniversary of her father Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart’s death. Also, she and Lynch have a relationship in wrestling that dates back 15 years. In Natalya’s eyes, this can be a legacy-building match for them.

“I want women who are in the industry, women’s wrestlers, up-and-coming women’s wrestlers, to be able to watch Nattie versus Becky from SummerSlam 2019 the way that I’m watching Bret Hart versus Steve Austin from WrestleMania 13,” she said.

Natalya calls getting this opportunity so close to her father’s death a coincidence and wishes he was around to see what she considers the biggest match of her career. She knows exactly where he’d be.

“I’d have him front row,” she said. “That’s how big this match feels to me.”

Natalya said she felt a fan jumping the barricade and tackling her and Hart at the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony in April caused some of her tribute to her dad, who was inducted as a member of the Hart Foundation, to be “overlooked.” Her goal was to express how important wrestling was to him. It’s a sentiment she shares.

“Wrestling is what’s in my heart,” Natalya said. “It’s what my family’s made of and it’s what I’ll carry on with me forever, just like what my dad carried on with him even long past his death.”

Natalya finds comfort being around her WWE family and fans, even dating back to last year’s SummerSlam, when she returned to support Ronda Rousey shortly after her dad’s death.

“They [the WWE Universe] were very comforting to me,” she said. “They made me feel less alone. I feel like I’ve been carrying that with me the whole entire time. I’ve been carrying their energy, their love and support.”

Natalya takes that into a match she said came “very unexpectedly.” And it became more explosive than she imagined once she snapped on Lynch after winning a No. 1 contender’s match.

Natalya said hearing Lynch during a promo say she wasn’t relevant and she was going to make her relevant “ignited something inside of me that just pissed me off.”

It wasn’t something she expected from a friend, someone who still has the letter Natalya wrote to her after a tour of Japan together in 2004. She said it caused her to do something she never had before.

“Everyone was shocked that I called Becky a bitch and kind of went off script,” Natalya said. “I did go off script. I did. For the first time in my WWE career, for the first time in my wrestling career, I broke the rules. I literally was like, ‘I don’t care.’”

Natalya, who also feuded with Lynch in 2016, said she sometimes wishes she would have rebelled a little earlier instead of being the “good girl,” but the timing wasn’t right because the women’s evolution in WWE only started being realized around 2015. The women prior to that weren’t given the same level of storylines and match time as they do now.

A two-time singles champion in WWE, Natalya takes pride in sticking it out with the company, waiting for her time to come and to play the role she did in sparking the evolution with her match against Charlotte Flair at the first NXT TakeOver in 2014. It’s why she sees some similarities in her and Lynch’s journeys, both being held back and having to fight for their opportunities. It’s just come under different circumstances.

“I think I was kind of in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Natalya said. “I feel like I came into WWE when the focus wasn’t really on women’s wrestling.”

It’s one of the reasons she is generous with her time, giving back to other female performers. Natalya helped prepare Rousey for WWE. NXT women’s title contender Mia Yim credits Natalya for giving her advice that still motivates her.

“I do enjoy helping women in the sport because I do need new women to wrestle with, but I also believe you get what you give,” Natalya said.

She recently trained with the women at WWE’s Performance Center to prepare for her match with Lynch, locking up with as many of them as she could — Shayna Baszler, Rhea Ripley and Meiko Satomura, among others. It was all to get her as prepared as possible for her moment at SummerSlam.

Natalya isn’t sure the exact reaction she will get from the Canadian crowd Sunday. There was a time in 1997 when the members of the Hart Foundation were huge heels in the United States and big babyfaces everywhere else.

Currently there is no bigger babyface in WWE than Lynch, who has begun calling herself Canada’s new hero. Natalya doesn’t want to use her Canadian heritage as a crutch with the audience.

“I don’t expect to walk through the curtain and have everybody cheering for me because I’m a Canadian,” the Calgary native said. “I want people to cheer me or boo me because they feel the need to do so. The fact of the matter is, people are going to make noise during my match with Becky.”

Most importantly, Natalya wants to make noise herself and produce a match with Lynch that has staying power and legacy, like Hart and Austin did at WrestleMania 13.

“I want women [wrestlers] to feel inspired and have women go, ‘Oh I want to have a match like that,’” Natalya said. “So that’s what I’m hoping this match can do. It sets the bar so high that the sky is the limit.”