6 Ups & 5 Downs From AEW Dynamite (29 Dec)
3. Short But Sweet
"CM Punk's First Appearance In Daily's Place" brought about memories of his summer turbo-pop tour, but All Elite Wrestling were smart to lean on the year's hottest signing making his debut appearance on company home turf.
As Punk alluded to in his beautiful asides on Jim Ross and the late great Brodie Lee, there's an importance to the venue not just for how it housed the company in the hardest times but just how emotional some of those hard times were. Threading together his feelings of wanting to be there and eventually making it, Punk captured that comeback kid magic one last time before moving business back to his rivalry with MJF.
A match wasn't made formal, but hostilities were kept heated. Punk popped the room with a Tim Tebow reference, and - building off MJF's earlier verbiage - pledged to halt any plans the 'Salt Of The Earth' had to strike gold. "CM Punk cuts excellent promo" is the easiest "Up" to give, but credit to AEW for keeping it simple and getting very much what they paid for.