I started watching mixed martial arts around 2007 or so. That meant that for the first six years of my life watching this sport, Anderson Silva was the sport’s god.

There have been other seemingly untouchable fighters over the time since then – Georges St-Pierre, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Jose Aldo – but the things that made them exceptional were more recognizable. With GSP, it was remarkably crisp striking, terrific wrestling, and great natural athleticism mixed with a motor that didn’t stop. With Khabib, it’s punishing strength and an almost gleeful mean streak. With Aldo, it was some of the sport’s greatest Muay Thai striking mixed with almost unbreakable takedown defense.

These were fighters with great natural ability who worked extremely hard to develop top-tier skill. But compared to someone like Silva, they were almost mundane. Silva – and to a lesser extent, Jon Jones, who mixes a ludicrous frame with a sheer genius for the sport – seemed like more. He was like a character ripped from a Bruce Lee movie.

During his reign as the UFC’s undisputed GOAT, Silva seemed like he could perceive the sport on a higher plane than anyone else. Maybe you could find another Dagestani kid who has breathed sambo and wrestling since he could walk – Lord knows it seems like there’s plenty of them – and drill him until he became a Khabib. Maybe you could find another Muay Thai fighter who can kick like a horse, work him until he had great takedown defense, and turn him into an Aldo. But you couldn’t find someone like Anderson Silva. He had inner gifts that you could never teach, no matter how hard you tried.

At his peak, he seemed like he was magic. He saw what was coming in slow motion and instantly calculated the most artful and humiliating way to counter them. For over a decade, I’ve considered his incredible Matrix-style demolition of very recent 205-pound champion Forrest Griffin to be the single greatest performance in the sport’s history.

After watching his destruction of Griffin, or his front-kick KO of Vitor Belfort, or the astonishing comeback against Chael Sonnen, you were left with a sense of giddy awe that you had the chance to watch someone so special. Since Silva’s reign ended in 2013, I had never felt a feeling like that again.

Until Saturday.

We’ve always known that Israel Adesanya was an incredible striker. He’s made that unmistakeable since the moment he stepped into the Octagon, and along his undeniable run to the middleweight title that Silva once held. You saw it in the war with Kelvin Gastelum, and his epic knockout of Robert Whittaker. But on Saturday, when Adesanya effortlessly destroyed the undefeated killer Paulo Costa, it was the first time he truly felt like he was invincible.

Costa came in with so much hype and so much bluster that it felt like a very real possibility that Izzy might lose his title. Costa looks like he’s chiseled out of marble, has cinderblocks for hands, and has fought with an unceasing pressure and a furious aggression. Izzy is a marvelous counter-striker, to be sure, but could he possibly withstand the force of nature that is Paulo Costa? Who can?

But sometimes the way a fighter’s opponents approach a fight tells the whole story. People who have been in that Octagon will always know more than us jackasses watching from the couch. And Paulo Costa came out scared on Saturday night. Whereas the prognosticators thought that he could be the man to crack Izzy’s defenses, he sees things on a different level of expertise, and he knew Izzy was too far ahead of the rest of the world. He stood there throughout the first round, eating leg kicks, hoping – like Yoel Romero before him, perhaps – that the champion would get antsy and open himself up.

But Adesanya is too disciplined for that. He was content to wait, like a coiled snake, and beat the holy bejeezus out of Costa’s lead leg. The few times Costa thought about uncorking one of his trademark rushes, Adesanya cut it off immediately with his brilliant movement and expert use of the jab. In the second round, Costa decided that he could no longer fully rein in his attacking instincts, but by that time Adesanya’s kicks had sapped him of his burst – Izzy’s reaction was swift, deadly, and beautiful to watch.

The combination that finally felled Costa was so fast that I had to rewatch it multiple times and slow it down to see what exactly the knockout blow was. It was a flawless victory. Israel Adesanya had taken the biggest dog in the yard and, with seemingly little trouble, reduced him to a whimpering puppy. It was a virtuoso performance worthy of Silva.

Like Silva did, Adesanya displays at times that ability to seemingly see things in slow motion – maybe that’s partially because with his punishing leg kicks, he eventually turns you into a slow-motion version of yourself. And it brings up the question: how on Earth do you beat this man?

Trying to come after him after him on the feet is a loser’s game: look what he did to Robert Whittaker. Trying to spam takedowns is a loser’s game: look what he did to Derek Brunson. That leaves trying to stand at range, but he’s got an 80-inch reach, and he’s going to touch you before you touch him. And he’s too smart to go away from what works best for him.

That could mean some boring fights for Izzy moving forward, but that’s also reminiscent of Silva: it always seemed like that for every Griffin or Belfort fight, there was a Thales Leites or Demian Maia, bouts that ended up being relatively dull because of the ludicrous skill gap and the reluctance of Silva’s opponents to allow the champion to put them on his highlight reel. Silva didn’t help himself by being a troll, content to play with his food and clown around instead of just ending things when he could. While he’s kind of a goof outside of the cage, Adesanya seems a little more merciless than that inside of it.

For the first time since 2013, when Silva at last fell to Chris Weidman, it feels like he has a successor. The kind of fighter who destroys his opponents with such style that you have go back and watch it, again and again. The kind of fighter who does things so unreal that you think you’re hallucinating. The kind of fighter who just seems special. Silva was there to pass the torch to him personally, when Adesanya beat him last February. Who knows where Izzy will go with it next?

The sport of mixed martial arts has only gotten more corporate and less weird over the last seven years. Sometimes, it seems like the magic has gone out of MMA. On Saturday night, Israel Adesanya showed the world that it’s still there, and still real.