For those of you who believe in miracles, the bad news first: Kofi Kingston did not win the WWE Championship. And if you were hoping for that outcome, that’s a somewhat dispiriting result on its face: The Dreadlocked Dynamo’s unexpected sprint to the Elimination Chamber technically only lasted five days — he was named to the match on Tuesday and went an hour in a Gauntlet Match to remind everyone why — but it felt like he had been fighting for the entire 11 years he’s been here, or maybe even longer.

On paper, he was a sentimental favorite, but that doesn’t seem to capture the respect and adoration the WWE Universe showered on him as a result of his week, his evening and his entire career; when the final pinfall was counted, you got the sense that if the WWE Universe could have entered the ring and borne his body to the locker room in magnificent defeat, they would have. Instead, The Dreadlocked Dynamo left under his own power with The New Day at his side, but moments earlier he jumped, he punched, he invited punishment to psych himself up and he even got the ceremonial Edge pose where he made a lunatic face and pressed it up against the edge of the Chamber. The man earned his moment and was more than ready for it; that Kofi didn’t win is in no way a knock on his performance. He went as big as he could, and then he went home.

The end result was, however, a rousing (if potentially begrudging) testimony to the man who walked into and out of the Chamber as WWE Champion, “The New” Daniel Bryan. If Kingston the WWE Universe’s sentimental favorite to leave with the title, the champion himself was the polar opposite for the competitors with which he shared the Chamber. Samoa Joe mottled Bryan’s chest with chops just seconds into the match, AJ Styles slapped him square across the face, and the only reason Randy Orton didn’t eat him alive was because he never really got the chance. That Bryan survived was a credit to his tenacity (Rowan was pre-emptively ejected from the match, leaving him stranded), his tolerance for pain and, yes, his in-ring skills, which have not diminished in the slightest because he stopped chanting “Yes.” Bryan won this one straight down the middle, biding his time and outlasting Kofi down the stretch. His eco-advocacy can be on the aggressive side, but the man can go.

The field thinned quickly, or quicker than the Women’s Elimination Chamber earlier in the night. Like the kaiju monster that inspires his theme song, Joe left chaos in his wake and was felled from above, courtesy of a Phenomenal Forearm from Styles. Jeff Hardy, far from obsolete, was dropped by a Running Knee from Bryan — though not before he landed a Swanton Bomb off the top of a Chamber pod to the lumbar of The Phenomenal One, who was draped face-down across a top turnbuckle. And Orton, who snatched AJ out of midair with an RKO to eliminate the two-time WWE Champion, was a little too impressed with himself and wandered right into a Trouble in Paradise from Kofi that took him out of contention and teed up the final battle with Bryan.

They fought. Goodness, did they fight. Sometimes they fought straight up — Kofi escaped the LeBell Lock via a good old-fashioned rope break, which surprisingly exists in an Elimination Chamber. Sometimes they fought dirty, slamming each other’s heads into a glass pane while slugging it out atop an empty pod. And in Kofi’s case, they fought risky; he attempted to follow up that hockey fight with a splash that carried him from the pod to the ring, where he had hoped a downed Bryan would be waiting. He wasn’t: The Beard dodged the maneuver, clambered to his feet and drilled Kingston with his Running Knee for the second time, sealing his victory and snapping Kofi’s dream of championship glory – at least for now.

“For now” being something of the operative words. As Big E and Xavier Woods rushed into the emptied-out Chamber to their brother’s side, the WWE Universe continued to show respect. “That’s for you,” Big E said to Kingston as he rose to his feet, and Kofi’s reaction before he finally walked back behind the curtain was one of respect returned, mutual gratification and seeming determination; the lasting impression of his latest attempt at the WWE Title was that it may not be his last. The night didn’t go his way, but it felt like a new day all the same.

Credit: WWE.com

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