PHILADELPHIA - Saturday night at UFC 101, my buddy Shaun and I entered the Wachovia Center - host of a fantasy land we thought only existed on our flat-screen TVs - for our first live event.

The card was dubbed "Declaration." Of what, I had no idea, but I couldn't wait to get some answers.

Sure enough, by the end of a long night, I had declared the following: Giddiness, boredom, restlessness, amazement, and satisfaction.

Initially, Shaun and I were like dorky kids.

We took pictures of the Octagon and texted them to friends from our spot in the third-level.

We excitedly squinted to identify cage-side fighters - although from our vantage point, Tito Ortiz, Randy Couture, Georges St. Pierre and The Beautiful Arianny all sort of looked alike.

I hooted and clapped for the artful master whose preeminence puts all others to shame - Bruce Buffer, of course.

I'd be lying, though, if I said the first four hours in our dream world were the equivalent of MMA Shangri-La. On a night that included appearances by two of the world's top five mixed martial artists, plenty of downers preceded.

For instance, financial advisers were available to those interested in purchasing a beer.

Plus, Shaun and I were the only goofballs in the place not wearing some kind of kick-ass T-shirts.

Meanwhile, the preliminary bouts crawled by with the thrill-a-minute pace of a "Murder, She Wrote" episode. The only blood to speak of came in discussing our nose-bleed seats.

And a wannabe Mike Goldberg behind us was busy giving the 20-seat radius his groundbreaking thoughts on every, damn thing that took place in the cage. (Sample gem: "Dude, Thalas Leites' ground game is sick!")

Ground game? Yes we saw plenty of that. Sadly, it was anything but sick, aside from a nice kimura applied by George Sotiropoulos to George Roop.

Throughout most of the early bouts, there was a common sequence: takedown, inactive stretch, stand up. Much of the time, the action was merely filler between seeing which Octagon Girl would take a turn.

You know it's bad when, at Pennsylvania's first UFC event, ardent Philly fans in the upper reaches break into chants of "E-A-G-L-E-S!"

The low point may have been Leites' fight - and I use that term loosely - against Alessio Sakara. Sakara (cool name; hideous tattoos) won a split decision that had the intensity of a grass-growing competition and stunningly proved that Leites, just four months removed from his pathetic effort against Anderson Silva, was indeed capable of embarrassing himself further.

Thankfully, the prelims ended. Before the main card began, a video montage set to The Who's "Teenage Wasteland" pumped through the arena. The killer combo of footage and music (hands down, my intro song if I was a fighter - to go with the equally awesome nickname "The Next Stage of Evolution") charged the audience.

Next, we saw two more lackluster decisions and Johny Hendricks' questionable 29-second knockout of Amir Sadollah before Shane Nelson and Aaron Riley reached the cage. Their rematch quickly fell into the Angela Lansbury sequence that became so familiar earlier in the night.

Some wise guys next to us suggested, "They should bring out Brock Lesnar and have him F-5 everyone."

That's when finally, out of nowhere, a brawl erupted at UFC 101 - in the crowd.

Shaun and I looked down in time to see a group...