Up until Saturday night, Sage Northcutt’s professional life had been one of happy-go-lucky serendipity. Dana White discovered him on a pilot for a new reality show without really looking for him. Northcutt was given a pretty good initial contract because he’s 19 years old with tremendous upside — a cartoonish combination of athleticism, good looks and a billable positive outlook. He got through his first couple of fights with everything intact.



Then he got routed into New Jersey, to the house of the Devils, and it was quickly learned who he was actually in league with. After tapping to an arm-triangle choke from half-guard on national television, he went from unreal prospect to masquerading fraud in the eyes of his peers. He went from discovered to exposed to many fans. Any of the narratives that had been built for him as an undefeated phenom petered out with the suddenness of a weak submission. Bryan Barberena, the man who did it to him, did a somersault to further mock the UFC’s latest "source of light."



And you know what? Good. Everything is as it should be.



All of this is a lesson to Northcutt for the stage he’s on and game he’s playing in. The fight game is cruel. In a larger sense, though it’s easy to hum along during the construction of such thralldom, we don’t tune in for happy narratives; we tune in to watch happy narratives crushed. The game isn’t just built on stars. It’s built on emotional stakes that come with exposing false idols. Fighters should know this better than anyone.



Let’s face it: Northcutt’s naïve attitude wasn’t just a fun change of pace for these last few months.



That naïvety was a target that would at some point get beaten out of him in public. That Sage himself was the last to understand this only made the situation that much more alluring/diabolical. As someone once said, innocence is among the most exciting things in the world.



It’s hard to blame Northcutt in any of it. As of late August he was coming up the rungs at a normal pace in Legacy, fighting guys of regional quality trying to do the same. Then the UFC stumbled on him. Five months later he came up a weight class on eight day’s notice to face a guy live on FOX that he’d never heard of.



He lost. But, man, those are some crazy ass circumstances flying at him at warp speed.



Nevertheless, it was like a dam burst for pent-up hostility when he tapped. Was the hate directed at him? Maybe a little bit. Indirectly it was more about how he was presented. The UFC, which built up the notion of omnipotence in bloom, is at the control boards of every cult status. Northcutt merely needed to live up to the billing. When he didn’t…it was ugly.



The golden child took him lumps on Saturday night in Newark. Did he panic in the situation? In the lights? In the moment? Who knows.



But you get the sense that this is exactly what Northcutt needed to happen if he wants to have any kind of sustainability in the cage. He’s got some work to do in fighting. He has time on his side. At some point he’ll dedicate himself to a camp full-time, whether it’s Tristar in Montreal or elsewhere, and he won’t be tapping to arm-triangles from half-guard. He’s still learning.



Northcutt is a 19-year old college student who had a red carpet rolled out for him to the UFC. It took a combination of luck and talent for him to end up in the UFC. It took a loss to realize that under that red carpet the earth is still crawling with worms.



For a kid who’s still in the early stages of gaining experience in the cage, this was also a lesson of what goes on out of it, too. And now is when the more realistic era of Sage Northcutt begins.