It began just as it would end – emotionally. Not because I was sad to leave my kids for five days, but because I was going to WrestleMania.

The event – held at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Texas in front of over 100,000 fans – is the 32nd edition of World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship show. A self-professed “pop culture phenomenon” with all the bells and whistles.

Indeed, this is not the dingy wrestling we knew from ITV’s World of Sport in the 1970s and ‘80s, or even the cartoonish Hulk Hogan-led WWE (then WWF) that ran roughshod over British kids and their unsuspecting parents’ wallets in the late 1980s and early 1990s.