Together, Junior dos Santos and Alistair Overeem have won 68 combined professional mixed martial arts fights. 40 of them were by knockout. They have a total of 37 years of pro experience, and have won titles in basically every major MMA organization that has ever existed. They are two of the greatest heavyweights who ever lived.

But, the end of the road comes for us all. And after a run of shows where a new group of heavyweight stars scored career-elevating wins – guys like Alexander Volkov, Chris Daukaus, Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane – the UFC is releasing them both. RIZIN had expressed interest in bringing Overeem back to Japan, where he starred in Pride and in successor promotion Dream, but the Dutch legend appeared to announce his retirement on Thursday. JDS, at 37 years old, looks like he wants to continue fighting somewhere, but his future is up in the air.

Heavyweight is a division where fighters often peak later in life than in lower weight classes. Overeem hit his peak in his early to mid-30s – Fabricio Werdum famously won his first world title at the age of 36. Heavyweights can often remain viable contenders into their late 30s and even early 40s. Even so, we knew a day like this was coming for both JDS and Overeem. It doesn’t make it any easier to know it’s actually here.

With both of their departures from the UFC – JDS coming off a four-fight losing streak, Overeem after a KO loss to Volkov where he looked more or less uncompetitive – the door has been officially closed on an entire era of heavyweight MMA. They alone were the last of their generation still near the top. Mixed martial arts is worse off without them.

Overeem is a legend in two sports, having shocked the world by winning the K-1 kickboxing world grand prix in 2010, aside from his exploits in MMA. The 40-year-old Dutchman was the last former Pride star to be truly relevant at the top level of MMA – a million years ago, Overeem was a well-regarded young light heavyweight who did battle with the likes of Chuck Liddell, Mauricio “Shogun” Rua and Ricardo Arona.

When Pride folded, Overeem was one of the more recognizable Pride stars not to jump to the UFC, instead gaining 50 pounds of muscle and becoming one of the most fearsome knockout forces heavyweight fighting has ever seen while fighting in Strikeforce, Dream and K-1. “Ubereem,” at his peak, was an absolute sight to behold. The idea that anyone could stand before this man seemed inconceivable. When he finally signed with the UFC in 2011 and ripped through former champion Brock Lesnar in his debut, it seemed like a world-shifting moment.

We obviously know what ended up happening over the next decade. Overeem never got his hands on the UFC title: he came agonizingly close in 2016, but his UFC run was characterized by finding ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Still, he reinvented himself into a wily veteran competitor as the years went on and his physical advantages diminished, and before his loss to Volkov, his one final run at a world title was starting to get near its goal.

Coincidentally, one of Overeem’s knockout victims during his tenure in the UFC was Junior dos Santos, dispatching the former champion with a nasty left hook in 2015. It was one of our first hints at the factors that would lead to JDS’ decline: to this day, he still has skills to pay the bills, but his chin no longer can.

Dos Santos arrived in the UFC in 2008, and his subsequent three-year run to the world championship was nothing short of exhilarating. His debut, where he knocked out the well-established Werdum with a soaring uppercut, is one of the most spectacular in the promotion’s history. Dos Santos was big, shockingly quick, and had a pair of hands that were extremely well-educated and powerful.

His amazing boxing skill carried him all the way to UFC gold in 2011, when he shocked the world by knocking out Cain Velasquez with an overhand right in the UFC’s first fight ever aired on network television. JDS has a highlight reel that can be matched by few in the sport’s history, and he holds the distinction of being one of just three men to ever beat Stipe Miocic, commonly regarded as the UFC’s all-time greatest heavyweight.

Dos Santos was sent packing off a run of four straight knockout losses, but they were all against elite opponents: Francis Ngannou, Curtis Blaydes, Jairzinho Rozenstruik and Gane. Although he never truly recovered from the two revenge beatings he got from Velasquez in 2012 and 2013, to the end he was a worthy foe for the sport’s best.

The time where Alistair Overeem and Junior dos Santos would ever compete for a world title had passed, but they were important links to earlier generations of the sport’s history. They were two heavyweights who had been in with MMA’s all-time greatest, and had beaten many legends between them. And to this day, they’re still better than many of the heavyweights the UFC currently employs.

If any real hall of fame for mixed martial arts is to exist, it won’t be complete without these two men. That’s why it feels so wrong that their UFC runs have come to an end this way – breaking over Twitter on a Wednesday afternoon in March, after knockout losses. They deserve a better send-off than that.

The eras they come from deserve a better send-off than that. But as fans, the best we can do is respect them on the way out. We’ll have to settle for that, for now.