Around the clock, from morning ‘til night, tremendous fights have been on offer, filling up the “Fight of the Year” ballot a good seven months before it even has to be submitted. For the hardcore fight fans of the world, it’s been a labor of love, an act of endurance, often at the expense of our overall wellbeing come the start of the work week.

But as we all staggered back to our desks on Monday morning or squinted our way into the kitchen to get the kids ready for school, we had plenty of source material to motivate us in our own personal battles.

Whether we think about it explicitly or not, much less verbalize it, many of us watch boxing because of the ways its athletes inspire us. Boxing has always been the most apt analogy for life that sport has to offer, a stripped down showcase of human struggle, both interpersonal and internal.

Much has been made of the greatness of the fights themselves and the transcendence of some of the winning performances, but they were made so by individual acts of courage in losing efforts.

There was Lenier Pero, exhausted to the brink of near-collapse and under the weight and volume of Jarrell Miller, absorbing more punches from a heavyweight in a 12-round fight than all but nine men in history. A week later, Isaac Lucero, seemingly a husk of his normal self on the night, trudged forward trying to win despite absorbing hellacious punishment from Ismael Flores.

Across the pond, Sam Eggington, a man who once thought he would travel down the journeyman route, went out on his own terms – on his shield – in the most dramatic fashion possible at the hands of Conah Walker.

In the biggest fights of the day, Junto Nakatani and Gilberto Ramirez dared to go down swinging with broken orbital bones against two pound-for-pound talents in Naoya Inoue and David Benavidez.

But no efforts were more memorable than Fabio Wardley’s display in Manchester. Wardley stood toe-to-toe with Daniel Dubois in one of the most breathtaking displays of heavyweight violence in many years.

There were times the fight looked like a movie scene, the brutality and resilience so outrageous that it felt unreal. At other times, it felt all too real, like a fight from a bygone era in which medical provisions were more relaxed.

At every turn, it was something extraordinary. Dubois himself deserves praise for his own perseverance, he a fighter who was once lauded as a “quitter” for not fighting through a broken eye socket. He was dropped hard moments into the fight, and there were moments in the fourth round in particular in which his own corner was openly questioning him.

For the vast majority of the fight, Wardley fought with grotesque swelling, bleeding, and an unsteady gait that would seem to have been from some chemistry of fatigue and neurological damage. At a rate just often enough to not just keep the fight going, but keep it genuinely compelling, he loaded up and either landed or barely missed rights that on another night, landed on the right fighter, would have ended a fight in an instant.

All the while, he was absorbing many more of those same types of blows. There reached a point in the final three rounds in which the audience seemed to know his valiant effort was one of futility, but he never came to that conclusion, not as the referee mercifully wrapped his arms around him, and not even as he spoke his first words about the loss a day later.

“My body failed me, but not my heart. And that I can live with,” Wardley tweeted.

For Wardley, not a single moment of the journey was futile. In fact, the treacherousness of it was the point.

Those who lose courageously are not just necessary pawns in the glorious tale of the victors. Courage should come with valor all on its own. But fighters like Wardley, Eggington and others put on display the depths fighters are willing to go to in order to win, even with the understanding that they might not.

In the boxing-to-life analogy, the vast majority of us are much closer to Peter Buckley than we are to Floyd Mayweather, enduring a series of losses for an honest wage, expending our resilience out of dignity and pride without the hope, much less the promise, of glory and celebration.

Even those whom we admire for their dominance still look to their moments of perseverance as notable sources of pride. Mayweather still references his scare against Shane Mosley, Roy Jones takes tremendous pride in fighting through a hideous cut against Joe Calzaghe.

Most famously, “The Greatest,” Muhammad Ali, finds his mythology rooted not just in his supernatural skill, but his ability to endure. There’s a reason every other gym you step into has a flag with a shadowy version of Ali doing roadwork with his famous quote, “suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion” printed atop.

In our own internal narratives that see ourselves as the protagonists within, we all imagine ourselves as being capable of a Wardley-esque effort if it came down to it in our own personal battles. We scroll through an endless deluge of memes using the language of fighters, of warriors, meant to inspire us in our own daily lives.

There is a reason why the Rocky franchise has endured, and why it’s the main boxing reference point for the general public, the tale of the man who might not have won, but had gone the distance. The man who could get hit hard yet get back up more often and harder than he could hit his opponent.

Efforts like Wardley’s show us one of the farthest extents of human grit on our screens or in the flesh. A man facing not just potential defeat, but increasing mortal danger, unwilling to relent on the belief that victory could still be possible, or if not, the satisfaction of continuing to strive will suffice.

Courage doesn’t only count when you win, one of many reasons why labelling fighters “quitters” has thankfully become less commonplace over the years, because doing what Wardley and others did the last few weeks is not the requirement, it is the exception. And the exceptions – a category every person who laces up a pair of gloves belongs to in ways we don't always appreciate enough – are what make the sport beautiful.