Sami Zayn compares the biggest match of his career to Brock Lesnar ending 'The Streak'

When Sami Zayn took the ring against Roman Reigns at the Elimination Chamber in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, it felt like a potentially career-defining moment.

If the ‘Underdog From the Underground' was able to cash in the goodwill he amassed as the ‘Honorary Uce,' a long-running story the likes of which Cody Rhodes hadn't quite established, it could have created one of the all-time great moments in WWE history, instantly vaulting the French-Canadian mid-carder to the top while giving him a special place in WWE history forever. The fans were at his back, the Bell Centre was as hot as can be, and all it would take to change history was a quick 1-2-3.

And yet, much like a few dozen men before him, it wasn't meant to be; Sami gave it his best shot, but in the end, Reigns worked over for most of the match and secured the victory in one of the more definitive decisions in his Universal Championship run.

Should Zayn have won the match? In his opinion, the answer is yes, though, as he explained to Peter Rosenberg on Cheap Heat, fans really wouldn't know the right decision for a few years, much like Brock Lesnar ending the Undertaker's streak at Wrestlemania.

“One thing is, I don't know if there is a ‘should have.' It's hard to evaluate on a long enough timeline,” Zayn said via Fightful. “It's been (a year and a few months) since that. Seeing how it all panned out, let's say that is where the title switch happened. Everything that has happened in the last year and a half, and there has been a lot of great programming, doesn't happen the same. It's the butterfly effect. One thing changes, all these things change,” Sami Zayn explained via 411 Mania.

“You can go back to big moments and big matches, like Brock (Lesnar) ending the (The Undertaker's) streak. When it happened, I was in NXT at the time, I was watching it with Juice Robinson. He was so shocked, and he goes, ‘It's going to take me five years to know if this was the right decision or not.' It's kind of true. It's like drafting someone in sports. You draft someone and it takes five years to know if it was the right call. It's hard to say. There is no way for me to not answer this with bias. I am biased because it was me, it was that story, it was that point in time, in that place, in front of that crowd.”

Did WWE make the right decision in having Lesnar end the streak? No. Aside from all the allegations levied against Lesnar, he was already incredibly over, and the win really didn't make him that much bigger of a Superstar.

Still, even if Zayn's match didn't go the way he wanted, he still thinks back fondly on the effort, both for what it was and what it could have been.

Sami Zayn believes he could have made an all-time moment

Asked how he thought things would have shaken out if he had secured the win against Reigns, Sami Zayn let it be known that, in his humble opinion, it would have gone down as an all-time great moment in WWE history, because even if the Rhodes-Reigns story had more build, his pop would have been generational.

“All I'm going to say is, if I had won that night, it would have been something that lived on forever. I get that it's a longer story that you're telling with Roman, and Cody is waiting in the wings, but if I'm looking at it in a bubble, in a vacuum, unquestionably, if I win it that night, that's a moment that lives on forever. Not just as me, in that moment,” Zayn explained.

“As a fan, we ultimately gravitate towards special moments, special audiences, special times when everybody is collectively in a moment that you know will live forever. That would have been one of those moments. I don't think there is any denying that. Whether it was the right moment for business or right choice or wrong choice, that stuff takes years to figure out. If I'm looking at it in a vacuum, all I can say is that if I had won that night, it would have gone down in history as one of the greatest moments that lived on in 10, 20 years, and you'd still be watching back just for the crowd reaction, if nothing else.”

While at the time, fans were trying to come up with any possible scenario that allowed Zayn to come out on top, ranging from challenging for just one of the titles to some sort of interference spot that set up a Daniel Bryan-style three-way title match at WrestleMania, in the end, wrestlers don't get to choose who wins and who loses, even for their biggest matches. Just getting to that moment has to be considered a career achievement for Zayn, and even if he didn't come out on top, he will surely remember the moment forever.