What happens when you promise us Fedor, but deliver just regular old Bellator?

If you saw some of the main events Bellator has put on in recent years – broadcasts that drew high ratings even with dismal athletic performances, as long as the names in the headliners were familiar enough – at some point you had to wonder what it would take for one of these “tentpole” shows to be a disappointment.

Then Matt Mitrione went to the hospital with a kidney stone hours before he was supposed to face Fedor Emelianenko in the main event of Bellator 172 in San Jose, Calif., and suddenly you had your answer.

How big of a shadow did the canceled headliner have on this event? After winning the first fight on the televised main card, Mauricio Alonso spoke about how honored he was to fight on the same card as Emelianenko. Even if he wasn’t actually, you know, fighting.

And the email Bellator sent out to media members a couple hours before the start of the main card? The subject line began: “The show must go on.” Never in the history of language or shows has that been the start of good news.

Then there was the brief GOAT sighting when Emelianenko accompanied his young protege Anatoly Tokov to the cage. Of course he had to get roped into the post-fight interview after Tokov’s win, addressing those members of the crowd who had opted not to exercise their refund option, informing them that he shared their disappointment.

Was Emelianenko as bummed by this turn of events as the rest of us were? Impossible to tell. Trying to use his tone or facial expression to determine how he’s feeling is like trying to figure out when a deer is lying to you.

For Emelianenko, it may have been just another cancelled (or, so Bellator would have us believe, postponed) fight. You know it’s not his first. And for sheer fan anticipation, it doesn’t match the Josh Barnett fight in Affliction that never was. At least this one seems unlikely to bring down an entire fight promotion with it.

It does, however, highlight some weaknesses. Bellator President Scott Coker said before this event that he was hoping to top 2 million viewers for this event. That seemed entirely plausible, based on past ratings numbers. Then the main event fell apart at the last minute and plausible jumped the next train out of town.

Now there was no more reward waiting for those with the patience to sit through another Cheick Kongo fight. Now we were left with a headliner that, while by no means bad, felt like just another night at Bellator.

That’s the problem with advertising Fedor and delivering Patricky Freire vs. Josh Thomson instead. You start by promising something that seems bigger and, if not better, then at least more bizarrely interesting than normal. Then you end up offering more or less the usual for the Coker-era Bellator: a “Pitbull” brother versus a former Strikeforce champ.

There’s no one to blame for any of that. Not really. Mitrione gets felled by a kidney stone before his big fight and there’s nothing to do but feel bad for him. And Bellator considered extremely late replacements but ultimately couldn’t pull it off.

In the end, Bellator had to be regular old Bellator. The show must go on, remember? But then, you wouldn’t even need to utter that phrase if there weren’t some small part of you hoping to forget the whole thing and just go home.

For more on Bellator 172, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.