Of all the kiwi sports yarns to come out of the 2020 hibernation, the preparation of City Kickboxing's UFC fighters and takeover of this weekend's UFC 253 in the United Arab Emirates is my pick for the funkiest yarn to spin.
Given that Lydia Ko missed the cut at the Women's Australian Open in February, the wave of 2020 mayhem might have come at a decent time for Aotearoa's young trooper as she has enjoyed the most consistent period of recent years since the LPGA Tour rolled back into action.
As you roll through life from the land Aotearoa, every scenario presents two paths where you can either dwell in negativity or bask in positivity and if you've been tuned into Black Sticks Women news of late, it seems many kiwis love cuddling up to that negative vibe.
In losing to Dustin Poirier over the weekend, Aotearoa's Dan Hooker bumped his UFC lightweight stocks up a wee bit in playing his role in an epc fight.
After a few months in the abyss, Aotearoa's UFC fighters are about to hit blast off on their 2020 ascension and when specifically referring to City Kickboxing, it's a blast off to establishing the Auckland gym/team as the best in the world.
In true UFC fashion, they are battlin' on through and will continue to churn out events as best as they can.
For many, culture in a sports or team context isn't real and is brushed aside as a cliche.
City Kickboxing represent combat sports in Aotearoa to the fullest, having aligned with the fighting excellence of those who came before CKB and this lineage is not only manifest in the current existence of CKB, also in how they go about their business inside the octagon.
City Kickboxing appeared to come out of nowhere to take over the world of Mixed Martial Arts and in the process they aligned with Aotearoa's sporting excellence.
All the highlights and video content from the Aotearoa leg of Black Sticks 2020 FIH Pro League journey.
Coming to the octagon after the glorious encounter between champion Weili Zhang and Joanna Jedrzejczyk in the UFC women's strawweight division, Israel Adesanya and Yoel Romero put on a show that ain't going to be described as fan-friendly.
All sorts of Israel Adesanya content to get you frothing for UFC 248 where Adesanya fights Yoel Romero.
This Sunday, Israel Adesanya has his second UFC middleweight title defence against Yoel Romero.
UFC Fight Night Auckland saw City Kickboxing win all three of their fights and as a mark of their dominance, this is the second time in 12 months CKB have enjoyed three wins on the same UFC card.
Today's the day, quite possibly the day that combat sports in Aotearoa completely flips on its head and the #KiwiUFC wave from 2019 is immediately sparked into action for 2020.
UFC Fight Night Auckland has almost arrived and one of the low key beautiful things to this monumental moment for #KiwiUFC is that there ain't no pay-per-view as it's all live on ESPN.
Trying to select one person or team above the plethora of kiwis doing tremendous sporting things around the world isn't really a kiwi thing to do.
Prior to 2019 kicking off, #KiwiUFC things were simmering away with the City Kickboxing whanau settling into the grind of stacking up fights in the UFC.
Think #KiwiUFC and two blokes probably popped into your noggin' automatically in Israel Adesanya and Dan Hooker.
The #KiwiUFC scheduling is heating up and while it's so much bigger than the UFC Auckland event on February 22nd, it does feel like the next few months will build nicely towards another UFC fight card in Aotearoa.