Good news for boxing fans: this weekend’s fight is the most important one of the year, a long-awaited meeting of two of the best fighters on the planet, with no firm consensus about who will win. Bad news for boxing itself: many casual fans have probably never heard of either guy, and are therefore unlikely to spend seventy dollars to watch the pay-per-view broadcast.

The narrow favorite is Andre Ward, a gold medallist at the 2004 Olympics, now thirty-two years old, who has been considered a potential star for so long that the notion is starting to seem self-refuting. Ward is a self-assured virtuoso from Oakland, possessed of a serious attitude and a tricky style—two attributes that help assure victory in the ring and a relatively low profile outside of it. His opponent is Sergey (Krusher) Kovalev, thirty-three, a hard-punching Russian with no particular interest in mythmaking. One afternoon a few months ago, talking on the phone as he drove around Southern California, where he lives, Kovalev responded with friendly disdain to a question about how his mindset differs from other boxers’. “I don’t think about this bullshit, really,” Kovalev said. “First of all, boxing is a sport for me—and after this, already, business.”

And yet, for that small but indomitable band of fans who still care, Ward-Kovalev is about as good as a pure boxing match gets. The weight limit is a hundred seventy-five pounds; the winner will be unanimously regarded as the best light heavyweight in the world and maybe also—not at all unanimously—as the best boxer at any weight. Each fighter seems close to his prime, and neither has been beaten. Kovalev is undefeated as a professional, and Ward’s winning streak goes back even further—he reportedly hasn’t lost since he was twelve. Kovalev’s main asset is simple: he punches with the kind of ruinous power that can’t help but preoccupy his opponent. Ward’s main asset is intriguingly complex: he has not so much a style as a meta-style, an ability to transform himself into whatever kind of boxer his opponent would least like to face. This is what seventy dollars buys, on Saturday night: up to twelve rounds of strategy and violence—no pageantry, no gimmicks, and nothing much in the way of an undercard.

It has now been a year and a half since the anticlimactic blockbuster fight between Floyd Mayweather, Jr., and Manny Pacquiao, during which time the sport has given old fans few new reasons to fall back in love. Dan Rafael is the boxing reporter for ESPN.com, and his coverage is so obsessive and comprehensive that it leaves little room for pessimism. Even so, last month, he wrote an uncharacteristically gloomy column in which he conceded that it was “hard to be a boxing fan right now”: despite the occasional entertaining fight, the year has largely been defined by mismatches and postponements.

Last weekend, for instance, while the U.F.C. put on one of the most entertaining mixed-martial-arts cards of all time, boxing fans were stuck with matchups that seemed to have been designed to repel intrepid viewers. On Spike, Danny Garcia, a top welterweight, faced (and beat) an obscure opponent, in a matchup that Rafael accurately described, in advance, as “sewage.” Meanwhile, HBO treated its subscribers to a fight, or at any rate an encounter, between Luis Ortiz, a fearsome Cuban heavyweight, and Malik Scott, a veteran best known for having once been on the wrong end of a singularly suspicious-looking knockout. During the third round, Max Kellerman tried to explain to viewers what they were seeing, and why. “When it comes to a guy like Luis Ortiz, the option, at this stage in his career, is either don’t see him at all, or see him in fights like this,” Kellerman said. (He noted that Ortiz had trouble booking decent opponents.) “As a boxing fan, my choice would be—it’s better than nothing. At least I get to see the guy.” By the sixth round, as Ortiz lumbered toward a decision victory, Kellerman was reconsidering. “The best thing about this fight, so far? It’s on at four o’clock in the afternoon,” he said. “The more eyeballs watch something like this, the less inclined they are to watch more boxing.”

In a different world—a different boxing era, a different media economy—a fight like Ward-Kovalev might be included in HBO’s monthly subscription, which hasn’t recently seemed like a great bargain for fight fans. Instead, HBO is trying to stoke interest in a strong but relatively unheralded pay-per-view. With the fighters themselves supplying relatively little in the way of fighting words, the network arranged a debate between their trainers, instead. (Ward’s trainer, Virgil Hunter, recently gained some unexpected renown when the R. & B. singer Keyshia Cole announced that he was her biological father.) Ward’s manager, the hip-hop pioneer James Prince, tried to play up the geopolitical stakes, saying, “This is Russia versus the U.S.A.” Then there is Claressa Shields, the two-time Olympic gold medallist, who is making her professional début on Saturday night—although her match is not part of the pay-per-view; it is being shown online by ESPN, during an early broadcast that begins at 7 P.M.

But really, the main event sells itself—that is, to the extent that it sells at all. Part of the problem is that, given Ward’s knack for frustrating his opponents, there is no guarantee that Kovalev will get a chance to show the world how hard he punches. There is a possibility that this showdown will more closely resemble a stalemate, with Ward winning by denying Kovalev the chance to do anything spectacular. Ward fans might look, hopefully, to Kovalev’s most recent fight, when he struggled, in July, to land clean punches on a designated opponent named Isaac Chilemba. (It was Kovalev’s first fight in his native Russia since the tragic night, in 2011, when Kovalev knocked out an opponent who later died from his injuries.) And Kovalev fans might look, just as hopefully, at Ward’s recent inactivity, which stems in part from a contract dispute: it has been five years since Ward’s signature victory, and four years since the last time he faced a noteworthy opponent. Ward is a year younger than Kovalev, but there is a chance that on Saturday night, he will look a bit older.

To any dedicated boxing fan—and surely more than a little dedication is required, these days—all the fretting about the relative obscurity of the sport might seem irrelevant. Being a boxing fan in 2016 means not worrying too much about who else is watching. And besides, the schedule is starting to fill up again—Rafael has, thank goodness, shaken off his pessimism, even despite the fact that Pacquiao and Mayweather seem to be thinking about a rematch. As Rafael should know as well as anyone, boxing always seems to be trying to kill itself and is never quite competent enough to succeed. And so now, at the end of a long, bad year, we may get the one thing that inspires us to put up with it all: a good fight.