Tuesday should have been another landmark day for Conor McGregor.
Another milestone notched on the journey to, well, wherever the hell it is the UFC's leading man is going.
A week out from his latest quest for greatness at UFC 196 in Las Vegas, his first Sports Illustrated cover would be revealed around mid-morning Stateside.
It would be another signal of the truly elite company that the Dubliner had now joined.
The Notorious one did indeed join some elite names and breathe some rarified air, but not quite in the way he'd planed.
Jack Nicklaus, Sugar Ray Leonard, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady, LeBron James, Tiger Woods, hell, even JFK. All have been victims in one way and many, many others of the Sports Illustrated cover jinx.
The bible of North American sports has a storied history of putting the hex on those who grace its front page.
But McGregor's edition hadn't even hit the news stands before it struck him down.
Alongside a particularly stoic, pulsing portrait shot ran the headline: 'Conor McGregor - Puts the fight in fighting Irish... and the fear in the rest of the UFC'.
"McGregor, already the featherweight champ," read the caption scrawled down the side of the cover shot, "can become the first to hold UFC belts in two classes when he fights for the lightweight title on March 5."
This week's cover: Conor McGregor puts the fight in Fighting Irish. https://t.co/ySaQIqpH0y pic.twitter.com/gFvnNXOsmK
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) February 23, 2016
Except that by the time the cover was released on social media, McGregor could no longer become that man.
Earlier on Tuesday morning, the UFC's lightweight champion, Rafael Dos Anjos was forced out of their superfight.
The Brazilian lightweight champion had suffered a broken left foot in training last weekend and it hadn't healed nearly enough in the intervening days.
So, while the UFC were scrambling to save yet another main event of a pay-per-view card - with Nate Diaz and Donald Cerrone jumping to the head of a queue of potential stand-ins - for McGregor, Tuesday marked another rude awakening.
There would have been more than a slight sense of deja vu when the news was relayed to the 27-year-old on the West Coast early yesterday morning. Six of his last 12 professional fights have seen a change of opponent through injury.
But to see Dos Anjos go down, just seven months after his compatriot Jose Aldo succumbed to a rib injury the week before he was supposed to meet McGregor at UFC 189, would have been particularly galling.
If you'd asked the Dubliner in early July last year how he saw the next 12 months going, the featherweight title fight with Aldo would have been the first step, a December defence may have followed, proceeded by a step-up to lightweight and then another summer superfight at whatever weight division he fancied.
With Dos Anjos and his lightweight belt now out of the picture for next weekend at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, McGregor is likely to find himself approaching a fight this summer - most probably at UFC 200 - having achieved just one of the three or four aims that would have been set in the days before Aldo pulled out of their original bout.
The man who sells himself as Mystic Mac never saw it playing out like this.
McGregor is an athlete desperate for rapid expansion, he wants progress to come quickly and for it to be measured in leaps and preferably bounds.
Instead, through little to no fault of his own, over the past year he's been forced to take a couple of steps back before being able to snipe a few more forward.
Yes, the way that the UFC 189 interim title fight with replacement Chad Mendes played out - a pulsating off-the-canvas and into orbit night for the Notorious team - ended up creating a momentum all of its own.
It helped make the eventual meeting with Aldo in December all the more anticipated. Then in 13 stunning seconds, McGregor downed the Brazilian icon and reached another plane again.
Taking each in their own right, neither outing could be considered anything other than gloriously successful, nights when McGregor had Las Vegas and the wider world of MMA in the palm of his hand.
But the bigger picture, the vast canvas of combat and beyond, is what McGregor obsesses over. And when the cold light of Tuesday morning shone on that picture, the 27-year-old would undoubtedly have seen more pockets of blank space than before.
The corner set aside for Las Vegas next week now looks emptiest of all, irrespective of who Dana White and the UFC brains trust hand the golden ticket to.
Aldo's coach confirmed to Brazilian TV yesterday that the organisation had reached out to his charge to see whether he could get them out of a significant hole and take the rematch he apparently craves on the shortest of notice.
But while mental scars may have healed, Aldo Junior is nowhere close to being physically ready to step back into a cage against the only man to ever knock him out.
"Dana called me, telling what happened and asking if Aldo was in shape to fight," Andre Pederneiras told Combate.
"I said he wasn’t and that there wasn’t enough time, and unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to fight next week."
So Cerrone, victorious a mere 48 hours ago with a facile submission over Alex Oliveira in Pittsburgh on Sunday night, and Diaz, who last fought in December, are the frontrunners, with a posse behind them that grew as Tuesday wore on.
And while both would be more than welcome adversaries in the hard-selling stakes, it might be hard for McGregor to see whether they're bringing anything tangible to his table.
Dos Anjos was bringing hardware, and with it, another chance at history. Both are the kind of currency that McGregor is desperate to deal exclusively in.
For the man who loves to tell the world that he "runs the fight game", being forced to again play a waiting game hurts most of all.
