One year ago, Sami Zayn was on top of the WWE Universe.

He'd just experienced a dramatic breakup with the hottest faction in professional wrestling, The Bloodline, was set to compete in the biggest match of his career in a hometown throwdown with Roman Reigns at the Elimination Chamber in his hometown, and was slowly but surely getting back together with Kevin Owens after a slow but rough fallout of their long-time friendship.

But since then? Well, he got back together with his fellow PWG alumni, headlined WrestleMania, and had a very fun run with the Undisputed WWE Tag Tea Titles culminating with a hockey-themed loss in Pittsburg,h but since Owens was moved over to SmackDown as part of the Jey Uso trade, things haven't been going particularly well for the “Underdog from the Underground,” as he's consistently fallen into a tear below the top guys on the Red Brand like Seth Rollins, Drew McIntyre, Seth Rollins, and CM Punk.

Discussing his recent string of bad luck with Jackie Redmond in a special prerecorded video on RAW, Zayn broke down how he's feeling at the moment and why he wants to fight harder than ever to prove to fans that they were right to believe in him.

“Uh yeah, I have been thinking a lot, and it does have a little bit to do with Drew McIntyre because, you know, I've had a really good year. I've been thinking a lot about the last year I've had; it's really taken me and transported me back to this time period last year right after the Royal Rumble, right before Elimination Chamber going into this huge, the biggest match of my career against Roman Reigns in my home town. Cinderella story, all the stars are lined up and I come close but, you know, I came up a little short and I've learned to not let that up. But there's this conversation after the match that I can't get out of my head, where Triple H pulled me aside, nobody really knows this, but he pulled me aside after the match and said, ‘Listen to me, you have nothing to be down about, you just gave the performance of a lifetime,'” Sami Zayn recalled to Jackie Redmond on RAW.

“He goes to me, ‘You're Rocky, you're Rocky; you're the ultimate underdog and, you know, in Rocky, he overcomes all of these obstacles and he doesn't beat the champion in Rocky I but he goes the distance with the champion and makes a name for himself and that's what you just did tonight.' And don't get me wrong, in the ring, I'll fight like an underdog, I'll fight like an underdog every single night, no I will give 100 percent in me like its life or death because for me, it is life or death but if I'm not alive in there, I might as well be dead. So I will fight like an underdog but I am not an underdog anymore, I am a contender now. I am a contender who will be a champion.”

Asked why he's so focused on trying to become a champion, Zayn noted that it's not so much about wanting to prove to himself that he belongs but to the fans who followed him last year that he's still someone worth believing in.

“Yeah, I mean, sure, there's a part, a part of me that needs to prove it to myself,” Zayn noted. “But it's about proving it to the people in these seats. It's about proving it to them; it's about proving that they didn't believe in me for nothing. They believed in me, and it's about proving them right: that's what it's about. That's what it's about.”

Is there a world where Zayn is able to recapture his momentum from 2023 and become a WrestleMania main eventer once more? Well, that depends on the storyline, as it took almost a decade for Zayn to get to that point, and he's lost his place since losing the belts and his feel-good story with KO. Still, considering the serious confusion at the top of the card at the moment, who knows, if Zayn can topple McIntyre in a high-profile match or win the Elimination Chamber in Australia, maybe he'll be back where he wants to be as a singles star instead of a tag team specialist.

Read Sami Zayn's recollection of Triple H's comments back in 2023.

Speaking of Sami Zayn's conversation with Paul “Triple H” Levesque, which he said few people knew about, that isn't totally true, as he actually commented on it before in an interview with Ryan Satin on his now-defunct Out of Character podcast, where he broke down the story in more extensive detail.

“Hunter talked to me a day or two later, and he was like, ‘Dude, what was with you in that press conference? You were such a downer. Like, you gotta think of what those people saw. Those people just saw the culmination of this amazing story for the last year, and they saw one of the most electric crowds ever, and the whole night was amazing. And you're like, you brought it down with that interview.' And I kinda saw his point, actually. Because I was looking at it through my lens,” Sami Zayn recalled via Ringside News.

“Well, then again, I am the one answering the questions, but it is true. If I step out of that disappointment for a week, people still talk to me about that match. People still talk about the atmosphere in that building. People still talk whether I should've won, whether I shoudn't have won. It's like this amazing point of contention that fans go back and talk about it. It was just a historic match. And it was the hottest match, I mean, man, I can't remember the time I've seen a crowd that hot for a match or a city that on board in such a real like sports team kinda way. It was monumental, and I'm just hung up. I'm like, ‘Yeah, but I lost.”

You know, for how *spoiler alert* fixed professional wrestling matches may be, the emotions behind the storylines are anything but fake, with performers getting incredibly invested in their efforts and feeling genuinely disappointed when they let their fans down, as Zayn clearly proved at last year's Elimination Chamber. Still, the beautiful thing about wrestling is, to paraphrase Triple H once more, that the story never actually ends, which means that he could be a few wins away from being right back on top of the WWE Universe if someone upstairs believes in him.