Just when you thought that maybe we were in danger of learning from our past mistakes in this sport, boom. You open up Twitter for all of five seconds and find out you were wrong.

So very, very wrong. So depressingly and predictably wrong.

Mere months after a bitter pre-fight build-up that verged on full cultural and religious warfare, a bit of hype theatre that we had to admit had gotten a little out of hand once it resulted in an ugly post-fight melee on the floor of T-Mobile Arena, the principals are all back at it, only this time it’s somehow worse.

You know by now how it goes. Conor McGregor retires with a tweet. Khabib Nurmagomedov compares him to a “jealous wife.” McGregor fires back with an insult aimed at Nurmagomedov’s wife and religious practices, just to ensure he touches all the high voltage wires at once, and Nurmagomedov responds with a tweet that repurposes the ugliest of all the McGregor accusations into just another insult between rivals.

I’d say there’s no way this ends well, except that we’re already at a very bad point, and it’s clearly not over yet – despite an apparent attempt by McGregor to squash it. I think we also have to admit that, in a variety of ways, we invited this.

Remember back when this feud first boiled over? It was just a about a year ago, when Nurmagomedov was caught on video slapping longtime McGregor teammate Artem Lobov in a hotel hallway. McGregor hopped on a jet for Brooklyn, threw a hand truck at a bus containing his new bitter enemy (among many others), breaking some glass and some laws in an expression of attention-getting rage.

It was unacceptable, disgusting, all the bad things. It simply could not be permitted. Then a couple months later it was just marketing material for the actual fight, and the UFC itself took no action whatsoever beyond booking these two men to fight each other.

It worked, too. When Nurmagomedov and McGregor fought for the lightweight title at UFC 229, following a press conference that seemed designed to incite a blood feud, the card they headlined smashed previous MMA pay-per-view records. It did $17 million just in ticket sales, also a new record.

Then Nurmagomedov celebrated a dominant victory by jumping out of the cage and brawling with McGregor’s team on the floor of the arena. This, too, was unacceptable and disgusting and so forth and etc.

It was bad enough that the Nevada State Athletic Commission handed out fines and suspensions, even toying with the idea of taking some official action to rein in all this wild trash talk. Mostly, though, it was content with taking a portion of the fighters’ money.

Still, we’d all learned our lesson, hadn’t we? We all agreed that a line had been crossed, which at least meant we knew where the line was. Then again, we’d also richly rewarded everyone involved – the UFC, the fighters, even the commission, in a roundabout way – so maybe we weren’t sending the message we thought we were.

But this time, come on, this time they’ve really gotten out of hand. The whole thing has “escalated,” UFC President Dana White says, “to a level that is not acceptable.” Now that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Just to heighten the sense of deja vu, here we are a year later and even Lobov is up to more or less the same stuff.

If you could get an honest answer out of McGregor and Nurmagomedov about what exactly they think they’re doing, aside from lashing out in blind anger, they’d probably tell you that they’re out here laying the promotional groundwork for the rematch.

Last time they got uncomfortably personal and they broke revenue records. So why wouldn’t they think that reaching new lows would result in even higher highs?

And the UFC, which will do the requisite handwringing when it has to, hasn’t shown much interest in doing anything else aside from turning this mutual hatred into a sellable commodity and then counting up the receipts.

As for us, the fans and the media, we cringe but keep watching. We might groan and cover our eyes, but we’re still peering through our fingers. We can worry outwardly about where all this is going, but we’re also fairly confident that we won’t be the ones who have to deal with the consequences, assuming there ever are any.

Because, so far, there hasn’t been much in the way of repercussions. You misbehave, and it costs you some money, but hey, it also makes you even more because the fight game loves nothing more than ethnocultural tensions filtered through a big money grudge match.

But is there a point where even we stop having fun with it? Could you devise a feud so ugly we don’t even want to see its violent climax? Because it kind of feels like that’s where we are now. If not, what would it take?

And if the answer is that there no limit to how far we’ll sink as we bear witness to two grotesquely warring factions, maybe the problem is us. Maybe we’re the ones who’ve really learned nothing. Especially if we keep rewarding worse and dumber versions of the same old thing again and again.

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