Edge and Rey Mysterio vs. Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit for the WWE Tag Team Championship, from WWE No Mercy 2002

If this isn’t the most intensely worked tag match of its respective decade, it has few equals. Standard wrestling character tropes are at play here (Angle is heel, Benoit is a tweener, MysteriEdge are faces), but their role is greatly diminished in favor of providing nonstop, mindblowing action. The match suffers slightly for this relative oversight, but anyone who says these guys couldn’t deliver the goods at their peak is either a liar or hates wrestling. There’s no denying that knowing the future of these four can make watching this a bittersweet experience, but for twenty minutes, they were gods.

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