Petr Yan outworked Merab Dvalishvili on Saturday at UFC 323 to reclaim the bantamweight title he lost in unceremonious fashion years ago.Chris Unger via Getty ImagesThe last UFC pay-per-view of 2025 — and the last big UFC event of the ESPN era — turned out to be one to remember. UFC 323 saw two titles change hands. The young devoured the old. Moral victories came at a bloody price.In the end we got a great reminder of what MMA can be at its very best. Here are the five biggest takeaways from Saturday night’s event in Las Vegas:1. Petr Yan just had the fight of his life. Just in time, too. Because if he’d lost to Merab Dvalishvili a second time, you know there probably wouldn’t have been a third. But with basically no one in the sport giving him any kind of chance to win, he went out there and solved the Dvalishvili puzzle one round at a time. I can’t quite say he made it look easy, but he did make it look like art.Honestly, simply keeping pace with Merab for five rounds is impressive. Slicing his face open and making him scream in pain from body shots — multiple times — is above and beyond anything most of us expected from Yan here. Just as it was starting to look like his brief time as UFC bantamweight champ was nothing more than a footnote, he goes and paints a masterpiece against arguably the best 135-pound champ the UFC has ever had.And new. And again. Let the second reign of Petr the Great commence. No matter where it goes from here, he’ll always have those 25 incredible minutes one night in December.2. Let’s be clear on one thing, though: Most people aren’t still standing after getting hit with all that for five bloody rounds. Dvalishvili lost his title, but he never lost heart. Not that we were in any danger of it before now, but let no one ever question that man’s toughness. What we may end up questioning in the days and weeks to come, however, is if it was really such a great idea to pack so much fist-fighting into this one year.I almost hate to even bring it up, since I don’t want to take a single thing away from what Yan did. But this was Dvalishvili’s fourth title fight of 2025. Four training camps. Four weight cuts. Four battles for UFC gold. At some point that has to catch up with a guy — even a guy who moves at Merab’s breakneck speed.3. That’s a very weird and anti-climactic way to become the second-youngest UFC champion. But hey, Joshua Van will take it. And you really can’t blame him.No fighter shows up hoping for a victory via freak, stomach-turning injury. And when it happens right away, as it did here when Alexandre Pantoja went to post on his left arm and ended up bending his bones in a direction they were never meant to go, it’s somehow even worse. Van never even got a chance to show what he could do. The fight had just started and then it was over. So … congrats?If the injury turns out to be as bad as it looked, there’s little chance of seeing Pantoja healed and ready to return for a rematch in a timely fashion. That leaves Van as a very young champ with a lot still to prove. As of now, he’s basically the champ by default.It’s better than never getting your hands on the belt at all, but people aren’t really going to look at him as a true UFC champ until he logs at least one defense. Even then, we might have to wait for Pantoja to come back around before the matter seems truly and finally settled. In the meantime, Tatsuro Taira’s big win over Brandon Moreno on the undercard should put him in a great position to step up and keep things interesting in the interim.4. Payton Talbott is still a work in progress, but the project now seems to be going somewhere. After seeing the way he got handled on the mat by Raoni Barcelos just a year ago, I admit I had some doubts about how he’d do against even this aged version of former Olympic gold medalist wrestler Henry Cejudo. So imagine my surprise when Talbott went out there and hit two takedowns in one round on Triple C, then pieced him up on the feet in a firefight down the stretch.The raw material is there. Obviously, it all needs a little more polishing before he’s ready for the next level. I just hope he gets the chance to to come along slowly without getting thrown in over his head for reasons of name recognition alone.5. Just when you thought Henry Cejudo’s comeback had done nothing but hurt his legacy, he goes and totally redeems himself. The record book will show that Cejudo ended his career on a loss. And that loss was his fourth in a row, a sharp decline for a man who initially walked away from this sport as a two-division champ with wins over GOATs in two separate weight classes.But what the win/loss column won’t tell you is just how gutsy that last one was. When he already had one foot out the door and there was really nothing left to fight for, Cejudo reached down deep inside and fought for pure pride and love of the sport. It wasn’t his best performance as an athlete. At 38, the best days are in the rearview, and that’s fine. But the fact that he had to wring out every last drop he had, relying on a stubbornly resilient spirt now that the flesh was failing, made this one of the most inspiring performances of his career.It’s great to watch a superb athlete in his prime. That’s one of the things we love about sports, is witnessing that elite level of human performance. But it means something different to watch someone will themselves across that finish line. Cejudo exited that cage for the final time beaten and bloody, but he was not defeated. That, too, is what keeps us watching this human trainwreck almost every Saturday night.