The Marshall's Cup is Two Quarters Full

You aren't totally psyched for the Roman Rumble?  Get behind the hype Dude, we're on the Road to Romanmania!  Who won the Rumble last year?  Who won it the year before?  Before that?  Before that?  I don't know Bro, but they were probably the most awesome wrestlers, and when they won, it was all like, "yeeEEEEAAAHHhh!!!!" with high-fives all around and stuff.  And the stakes are so frickin high this year!  Come on Dude, like, how sick would it be if Triple H won the belt?  Picture it Bro!  And what a historical night would it be if Roman Reigns overcame the odds and retained?  Like, holy shit Dude!  What's Brock Lesnar gonna do, like fricking murder 10 guys?  He's the Beast Incarnate, Bro!  Who else is in this match again?

Honestly, I am excited for it, but only for one reason, and it's not even a sure thing.  I want to see AJ Styles in WWE, and, like Shoemaker said, on every single countdown, all 30 of them, all the marks (myself included) are holding our breath in anticipation of the arrival of something impossibly great (I believe "the ghost of Bruno Sammartino, no wait he's still alive" was the example given).  If AJ debuts, I'm gonna lose my shit, then I'll be despondent when his Romanmania match is set up by getting thrown out by Dolph Ziggler.  But I'll tell you exactly what I want to see: AJ win.  It would carry on this amazing cross-promotional meta-narrative, with AJ winning heavyweight titles all over the globe, most notably the IGPW World Heavyweight Championship in his very first match in New Japan.  If history repeated, and AJ won the WWE World Heavyweight Chompyonchaw in the Roman Rumble, that would be an incredible moment, and I'd be back on WWE like barbed wire on a kendo stick.  (Technically, it wouldn't be AJ's first WWE match, but functionally it might as well be.)  If Anderson, Gallows, and Balor debuted in the Rumble also, to help secure AJ's win, all the better.  I figure (like most people do) that Balor is the one that WWE really want to invest in, but all the more reason to debut him in a subordinative role (like they did with Edge-- they only brought the indy vet Gangrel in to debut Edge, and Christian was always just Edge's friend to the bookerman).  Styles wins the Heavyweight title, Bullet Club 2.0 run rampant for a while, then Balor rises up, defeats, and eclipses the rest.  Two year story, minimum.  (What's that, Roman and Brock are injured?  Okay, I guess we can fast-track it to culminate in April...)

It's the most fun PPV to fantasy-book, but we come up with so many awesome ideas that it hasn't lived up to expectation since, I dunno, 2007?  Almost a decade ago.  I wasn't watching then anyway.  Maybe the trick is to keep expectations low, but not SO low that you don't bother watching at all.  Keep the expectation level at IV out of X.