Becky Lynch has put her WrestleMania 38 match with Bianca Belair near the top of her list of favorites, saying the bout mattered because it came after her return at SummerSlam in 2021 and ended with the payoff she wanted. Speaking after WWE Raw was revealed for Dublin, Ireland for the first time, Lynch said the match worked because it carried the full weight of that comeback, the title change and the recovery that followed.
Lynch said the 26-second title switch in 2021 made the later match mean more, because Belair had every reason not to trust her and still handled the story with grace. She said she loved the build, loved working with Belair and loved seeing her get her moment in front of her family. That is the part that makes the match stand out beyond the result: it was not just a title defense, but a cleanup of an earlier shock that turned into a finish both women could claim.
The comments came during a conversation with Will O'Callaghan on Off The Ball, where Lynch and Finn Balor were asked to name their favorite matches. Lynch rarely replays her own work, and Balor said he is the same, so the choices carried extra weight. For Lynch, the answer was not one of her older matches with Sasha Banks at NXT Takeover: Unstoppable or Charlotte Flair, but the WrestleMania 38 meeting with Belair that she says delivered exactly where the story was headed.
What makes Lynch’s answer land is the contradiction inside it. She said things changed and the plan went in a different direction at points, yet the finished match still gave Belair her moment and gave the whole arc its payoff. That is also why the brief 26-second loss still matters in the story: it set the math of the comeback, and without that earlier shock, the later win would not have carried the same force.
Balor offered his own example of that kind of surprise, picking an NXT Championship match with Samoa Joe at a WWE house show in Lowell, Massachusetts in 2016, where even people backstage did not know he was losing the title that night. Both wrestlers described wrestling as something they trust more in the moment than on tape, which fits the way Lynch talked about Belair: not as a scene she wants to relive, but as a chapter she knows worked. The unanswered question now is whether either will ever be willing to watch the matches that shaped those memories, or whether they are better left where they happened.
