WrestleMania 28: Match for Rock-Cena Can't Possibly Live Up to Hype

The main event at WWE WrestleMania XXVIII between The Rock and John Cena will shatter all expectations, shift the landscape of professional wrestling and raise the bar for sports-entertainment from here to eternity all in one fell swoop.

Or not. April Fool's.

What a coincidence! The Rock and The Prototype will meet in the ring at Sun Life Stadium in Miami—where the former played his college football with the 1991 national-champion Hurricanes—on April 1st.

But that isn't the only reason this "Once in a Lifetime" tilt will be a joke, at least by its own standards.

The fact is, the WWE has been pushing and pumping up this match so much and for so long that there's no way it could ever meet the expectations that Vince McMahon and his marketing "masterminds" have ascribed to it.

Cena vs. The Rock has been on the calendar for nearly a year now, since these two superstars came to a handshake agreement the night after WrestleMania XXVII, at which The People's Champ hit Cena with a Rock Bottom to help The Miz hang onto his WWE Championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

The intervening months have seen Cena and The Rock awkwardly waiting to exhale—and leaving fans to wonder why the buildup had to be so gratuitously lengthy. The typical trash talk and chest-puffing bravado was punctuated by a rather strange alliance between these two scheduled foes at the 25th Survivor Series at Madison Square Garden earlier this year.

Of course, it didn't take long for The Rock to redraw the line in the sand between himself and Cena, dropping his partner in "The Most Charismatic Tag Team of All Time" with yet another Rock Bottom shortly after putting an end to The Awesome Truth.

Which (mercifully) brings us to WrestleMania, wherein The Rock and Cena will (finally) go head-to-head for real.

The question is, does anyone really care anymore? We've heard all the hyperbole ad nauseum for so long now that there might actually be more merriment to be had when this thing is over, the relief in the aftermath outweighing the burdensome hype before and the excitement during.

Because, ultimately, there's not much these two legends of wrestling can do to live up to the lofty billing that's been laid before them for an entire trip around the sun, save for reanimating all the greats of the past and having them dance in a line across the length of the stadium.

So if you can, indeed, smell what The Rock is cookin', let him know—it's probably a fresh pot of self-inflicted disappointment.

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