At ringside the next afternoon, fight writers exchanged knowing chatter before the first undercard bout. “He’s old-school, the way he rolls with the shots,” said one. Others nodded sagely. Nearby, Jim Lampley recorded voice-overs for the HBO telecast later that evening, switching his Dramatic Announcer Voice on and off.

The undercard, nine bouts in which anointed winners teed off on designated losers, began six hours before the main event. After a while I began to feel gorged on boxing, as if I were eating one meat course after another, starting with baloney and working up to wild boar and cerf à la royale. I tried to save room for the main course.

As the main event approached, the crowd grew giddy with the realization that Kovalev and Ward were actually about to fight. The tacit shared knowledge that looking forward so keenly to a fight probably made us all bad people strengthened the crowd’s sense of itself. Those who disapprove of boxing might well regard us as embarrassing holdovers in a supposedly more-evolved age of remote-control violence, but morally indefensible blood sport can still teach you something meaningful about being human — and, anyway, what competing agonistic spectacles qualify as morally superior these days? Football? Electoral politics?

The color guard entered the ring for the Russian and American national anthems. Patriotism always strikes me as out of place at the fights, where the tribal identification that matters most is not national or even ethnic but stylistic: in this case, the seek-and-destroy hitter from Chelyabinsk versus the cerebral tactician from Oakland.

It was time to put everything else aside and watch the two men figure the complex problem posed by their matchup. At first, Kovalev seemed to hurt Ward every time he touched him, even with his jab. Ward grabbed him around the waist and hung on, trying to adjust to the force of his power. In the second round Kovalev caught Ward coming in and dropped him to all fours with a crushing right.

Ward got up. He was in trouble, but he hadn’t lost his poise. It was as if he found himself suddenly marooned in a strange land where safes and anvils fell from the sky at the behest of a malign regime. The story of the fight was the story of his working out how to survive in this terrible place, then to prosper, and finally to overthrow the government.