Dominick Cruz's win, like his comeback, a testament to resilience and resolve

People shouldn’t be able to do the things Dominick Cruz does on their own ligaments, let alone someone else’s.

They definitely shouldn’t be able to do them after spending most of the past half-decade either going into surgery or coming out, bouncing between the gym and rehab so often that even he must have had days where he got confused and drove to the wrong one.

To come back after all that and put on the kind of performance Cruz (21-1 MMA, 4-0 UFC) did against T.J. Dillashaw (12-3 MMA, 8-3 UFC) in Sunday’s UFC Fight Night 81 headliner in Boston, reclaiming the UFC bantamweight title that he never technically lost with a nail-biter of a split-decision victory after five frantic rounds, it barely seems possible.

Which made it even stranger to watch Cruz react to his own resurrection like he’d known how it would happen all along, but was glad to see the rest of us finally catching up.

You can’t call Cruz’s win over Dillashaw a flawless performance, or even a dominant one (watch the Cruz vs. Dillashaw video highlights). Somehow, that almost made it better.

Cruz ate more power shots in this fight than he did in probably his entire reign as WEC bantamweight champ. It wasn’t that he was that much slower than he’d been back when he had mint condition knees, but rather that he was up against better competition.

Dillashaw proved to be that rare Cruz opponent who didn’t get frustrated when he found himself swinging and missing in the early rounds. Most likely he’d watched enough tape on the former champ to know that fighting him was part ghost-hunt and part pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. The key, Dillashaw seemed to believe, was to just keep throwing, reasoning that even if Cruz wasn’t where you thought he was, he had to be somewhere.

And, sure enough, Dillashaw managed to find him more often than most. With hooks and headkicks, he tested Cruz’s chin. With leg kicks and knees, he also tested the work of Cruz’s surgeons, who apparently put everything back in better shape than they found it.

So as Cruz limped his way into the championship rounds, doing his best to maintain a poker face even as his left leg – he said afterward it was a pre-existing injury to his foot – seemed to betray him, it had the effect of putting his resilience and resolve on display along with his skills.

And, after all Cruz has been through, that’s just about perfect. His story may have started as one more tale about a talented athlete doing talented athlete things, but it didn’t stay that way. At some point it became a story about suffering, and then one about bad luck and worse ligaments. Somewhere along the way it started to seem like a very real possibility that we’d seen the last of Dominick Cruz, or at least the best.

The only person who never seemed to buy this, even just a little bit, was Cruz himself. He insisted he’d be back, which sometimes seemed like wishful thinking. He also claimed he wouldn’t even be rusty from all that time away, which seemed downright delusional. And yet, somehow, he ended up being right.

Although as much as he might like to think that his performance debunked once and for all the theory of ring rust, that’s one area where Cruz is wrong. He didn’t prove that ring rust is a myth; he proved that, real though it may be, it’s not enough to stop him.

So far, nothing has been.

For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 81, stay tuned to the UFC Events section of the site.