The lead up to this year’s WrestleMania wasn’t the best. A lot of the matches that have been built up on Raw just didn’t do anything to make anyone excited.

So when I say WrestleMania this year was really good just know the setup this year lowered my expectations so much that it didn’t take much for it to be impressive.

The pre-show, however, was kind of boring.

Four tag team matches for the championship wasn’t too interesting as I am pretty sure they were the last four tag teams the WWE even has at the moment.

Overall, it didn’t need to be two hours and the battle royal really should have been on the main card.

They opened the main card of WrestleMania with a seven man ladder match for the intercontinental title.

It’s nice to see them trying to give the secondary titles some weight finally and I was OK with this match as it had some really brutal spots.

It was great to see that they are putting some faith in Daniel Bryan to bring back prestige to the IC title by letting him win.

One contender really didn’t belong in it though.

As they were building a Stardust versus Goldust feud, they just dropped the contender so they could add an extra person to the match.

The second match was between Randy Orton and Seth Rollins and it honestly might be in the running for match of the night.

The match was fast-paced and ended with Randy Orton landing probably his best RKO of all time to counter Seth Rollins going for a midair curb stomp.

It was so smooth and gave Orton the win.

After that was a no DQ match between Triple H and Sting.

This match had a lot of rest holds and excuses for them to rest via having teams from the attitude era show up. The match was boring, but before the match something unintentionally hilarious happened.

During WrestleMania wrestlers get more theatrical entrances.

For some reason Triple H’s entrance was a tie in for the new Terminator film and he came out wearing the most ridiculous cyborg-like costume.

The divas match was a tag team match between Paige and AJ facing off with the Bella twins and it was better than most diva matches. WWE is finally giving them a chance to have matches that last awhile. While Paige and AJ have been pretty great for a while it also gave the Bellas a chance to show that they’ve improved.

The fifth match was Cena vs Rusev for the U.S. title.

Before I talk about the match though Rusevs entrance was pretty awesome.

They’re still going with the Russian villain theme so his entrance involved people dressed up as Russian soldiers and he arrived via a tank.

Their match as a whole was really good with both getting their big spots.

The ending, however, was predictable.

Cena got out of Rusevs submission hold and hit him with a finisher to end it and became the new U.S. champion.

I am assuming it’s also to try to make the mid tier belts worth more, but every year Cena feuds with someone who’s only recently been pulled up from NXT and all their momentum seems to go away.

Between matches there was a promo with the Authority, Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, and the Rock.

The only thing of note is the Rock brought out UFC women’s champ Ronda Rousey.

I was dreading the Undertaker’s match versus Bray Wyatt, but the match was better than I expected and pretty much showed that the Undertaker still has it.

The main event was Roman Reigns versus Brock Lesnar, but it was basically a repeat of Brock Lesnar’s last few matches.

He brutalized Reigns throughout the match and even no sold some of his finishers. The ending came after both of them were worn out. Seth Rollins ran out and used his money in the bank contract to make it a triple threat.

He ended up pinning Reigns and becoming the WWE champion which was the best thing that could happen. It means the championship will be on TV while Lesnar isn’t and it also keeps it out of Reigns’ hands for a while.

Overall the pay-per-view performance was a 7.5 out of 10 instead of the 4 out of 10 that many expected it to be.

Mace Mackiewicz is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at 582-2812 or mmmackiewicz@eiu.edu.