Professional wrestling fans worldwide rejoiced tonight as they were, after many years of auditory torture, freed from their forced exposure to the music of Nickelback.

The landmark 1000th episode of WWE’s Monday Night Raw opened with the song “Tonight is the Night” by Outasight, rather than the predictable frat-rock warble of Nickelback’s insipid “Burn it to the Ground.”

“Thank God that’s over,” said avid wrestling fan Jesse Perkins, who said he survived the weekly ordeal by stuffing his ears with cotton and loudly humming the Super Mario Brothers theme song to drown out Nickelback’s opening theme of Raw.

“I didn’t think the sorrow would ever end.”

According to a recent study published by Harvard University, some wrestling fans actually grew to enjoy the Nickelback song — a phenomenon akin to Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological phenomenon in which victims of kidnapping grow to identify with their captors.

“It’s a disturbing scenario,” says researcher Prof. Gene Steinmeyer. “Nickelback continues to gain fans, even though most people consider their so-called music torturous to endure.”

Most wrestling fans agree that, even though the new Raw theme by Outasight is much preferable to Nickelback’s arena-rock monstrosity, the new theme will probably start to sound quite awful by November.