When Brian Pillman Jr. made his AEW Dark debut versus Shawn Spears back in July of 2020, it felt like a big deal.

While this match wasn't the first time Pillman appeared in an AEW ring, as he was one of the 21 entrants in the Casino Battle Royal at Double or Nothing 2019 – 22, really, if you count Orange Cassidy – but when the promotion officially got off the ground and was looking to secure full-time performers, it was too late: Pillman was already under contract with MLW and thus, couldn't sign a deal with Tony Khan's company.

Now granted, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing; Pillman was booked very well as a member of The Hart Foundation and even made it all the way to the 2019 Opera Cup Finals, where he lost the trophy to his fellow faction mate Davey Boy Smith Jr., but even after competing in six different championship matches and being booked well in each match, Pillman's desire for bigger and better things quickly came into focus. When MLW closed down business due to the COVID-19 shutdowns, Pillman made his way down to Jacksonville and back into Tony Khan's ring for a series of star-making Dark matches.

Debuting with a tank graphic made out of bullets and booked like a star despite dropping his debut singles offering to Shawn Spears, Pillman wrestled one more singles match in a bout for the FTW Championship on Dark before linking up with Griff Garrison in a team now known as the Varsity Blonds; a team that wrestled together in 64 of Pillman's subsequent 74 matches in AEW.

Have the duo been successful? Eh, sort of; the Blonds have only won 37 of their 64 matches as a team for a winning percentage of 57.8 – a number elevated considerably by Dark and Dark Elevation – but when it counts, they have consistently come up short, going 0-1 in their matches for the AEW Tag Team Championship.

Really, it's no wonder Pillman has suggested in the past that the Blonds may eventually go their separate ways, especially now that Julia Hart has joined the House of Black. Fortunately, if that is the route TK decides to take, Pillman shouldn't have much trouble transitioning back to being a singles competitor, as he has all of the infrastructure in place to be successful with the right push in AEW.

Once a Hart Foundation member, always a Hart Foundation member, AEW fans.

When talking about his wrestling career with Justin Couch of Couch Conversations, Pillman Jr. had nothing but complementary things to say about the older performers like Chris Jericho, the Hardy Brothers, Bret Hart, and the rest of the Hart family who have helped him out along the way. Here's what he had to say to Couch via a transcription from Fightful.

“Some guys were just super inspired by his work and like admired him and want to help me because of that. Some guys were like his best friend ever. But yeah, you know, they just want me to do my own thing, you know what I mean? So just the level of the degree to which people reach out and extend their hands is just variable. Like, I said, like Matt and Jeff (Hardy), those guys have been — Matt’s been great to me every time.”

“Chris Jericho never even — maybe met my dad one time. He's one of my ultimate mentors and sort of guides in this business. So Chris, being a great help and in the Hart family, I mean, they've been nothing but good to me ever since I started wrestling. Natalya (Neidhart), and TJ (Tyson Kidd). I've gone and trained with them a few times. I've been back up to Calgary to see Bret (Hart). So they've all really like — especially the Calgary people in Canada. People in Canada love my dad. He lived there for quite a while. I think he lived there for several years. You know, he was playing football and then he got into the Calgary Stampede Wrestling and all that, so there's a good amount of family out there. I'm basically a part of the big wrestling family if you think about it.”

Now, as fans of professional wrestling know, none of this should be too much of a surprise; Pillman Jr.'s father trained in the famous Dungeon of the late Stu Hart and was a member of the Hart Foundation alongside Bret, Jim ” The Anvil” Neidhart, and the “British Bulldog” Davey Boy Smith because of this connection. Remaining close with his family's Calgary connections, from Jericho to Natalya and her husband, Tyson Kidd, makes a ton of sense. Pillman Jr. was a member of the Hart Foundation in MLW because of his familiar connections to the famous wrestling family, and after witnessing just how much he struggled following the death of his father on Darkside of the Ring – a show that Jericho narrates – it's no wonder that so many people reached out to the second-generation performer to help him out in whatever way they could.

With many of the best wrestlers in the world in his corner, if Pillman gets the right push, he too could find himself a champion following the disbandment of a blond tag team.