Is Beth Phoenix’s return from retirement just a nostalgia trip? WWE Universe, it is not. The Glamazon was a house on fire in an Eight-Woman Tag Team Match six days before WrestleMania’s cross-generational Fatal 4-Way for the WWE Women’s Tag Team Titles, and she was a problem for champions and challengers alike in what ended up being her first Raw victory in nearly seven years.

Not only did Phoenix go head-on with reigning champions Sasha Banks & Bayley (her partners, mind you) on multiple occasions, she pie-faced Banks off the apron and snagged the fateful tag from Bayley that allowed her to singlehandedly dispatch her team’s four opponents. The WWE Hall of Famer plowed a meddling Tamina through the ring barricade and pulverized Peyton Royce of The IIconics with a Glam Slam to win the match, looking none the worse for wear. She’s still got it, and for all Banks & Bayley’s defiant posing with their titles in the wake of the bout, it had the look of a somewhat empty gesture: At least on this night, there was no denying who the dominant force was.

Give Batista this: He got what he wanted. Triple H at WrestleMania in a potential career-capping match? Done. An extra caveat that The Game has to hang up his boots if he loses? He even secured that thanks to a savvy bit of legalese. Take issue with his methods all you want — and there’s plenty of issue to take — but Big Dave’s comeback has been one successfully-executed power play after another, right down to his final Raw before WrestleMania, wherein he marched down the ramp, seemingly ready to give one final impassioned speech … and then threw to a video package of his various victories over Triple H, told The Game to “kiss his a**” and walked out of the ring. As a troll of his opponent, The Animal's move was unparalleled. His hometown crowd seemed to appreciate it, too. But he might do well to refrain from counting his chickens. For all his confidence, he might be forgetting one thing: Triple H is getting what he wants as well.

Apollo Crews feels like he’s one signature victory away from truly breaking out, and it’s looking like the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal might well be the match that sees him do just that. Not only did Crews dispatch Jinder Mahal in a pace-setter just six days out from WrestleMania’s signature melee, he stood tall in a scramble among Raw’s various Battle Royal entrants, last tossing Mahal and The Singh Brothers over the top rope to complete the demonstration. Good omens abound for Sunday, and while victory is far from assured — presumptive favorite Braun Strowman looms large in the distance — he may have finally hit the point where he's turned fighting from underneath into an advantage.

For a couple of months now, The Revival and Aleister Black & Ricochet have been two tag teams on seemingly opposite trajectories. The former completed their march to the top and hit rough sledding almost instantly, while the latter got thrown together as a tag team and seemingly haven’t lost a match since. (They’ll challenge for the NXT Tag Team Titles on Friday following their victory in the 2019 Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic). Suffice it to say, it’s not every day the champs walk into a title defense as seeming underdogs the way Dash & Dawson did on Raw, but the “Top Guys’” retention was far from a certainty, and it took every bit of cunning and rule-bending in their very deep playbook to attain.

That said, give credit where credit is due to The Revival for finagling a count-out victory following a brawl outside the ring when Scott Dawson hid under the ring and grabbed hold of Ricochet’s ankle, allowing Dash Wilder to beat the count. Black & Ricochet got payback in the form of a Black Mass and 630 to the champions, but for all their upward trajectory, they’ve ironically found themselves bouncing up against the same glass ceiling the “Top Guys” used to slam against. They’ll likely break through eventually. Just not tonight.

Roman Reigns is going to fight Drew McIntyre on Sunday, and the lingering question thus far has been whether or not he should have taken the bait from The Scottish Psychopath. Nobody has bothered to question whether Reigns can handle the bout ... at least until tonight.

As Dasha Fuentes pointed out, while Reigns looked great alongside The Shield last month, The Big Dog has been overwhelmed by McIntyre at every turn, from the beatdown three weeks ago to the low blow last week. And despite Reigns' insistence that he was 100 percent cleared for singles action, an out-of-nowhere bushwhacking from McIntyre left the former Universal Champion struggling to his feet just moments later. Prognostications of a surefire defeat are, of course, a little hasty: Six days is plenty of time to right the ship, and Reigns’ dogged pride has carried him to many an unlikely victory. But McIntyre may well have baited him into a fight he can't win.

With Aleister Black & Ricochet out of the way and WrestleMania just six days out, the Raw Tag Team division is wide open for a prospective title bout on The Grandest Stage of Them All. The Revival have no shortage of contenders, of course. But the only team to notch a victory in this mad dash thus far has been Heavy Machinery, who overcame a distracting appearance by Lacey Evans to take advantage of some inglorious miscommunication between Bobby Roode & Chad Gable and earn a pinfall over the former champions. Roode, in particular, looked shaken by his team’s inability to capitalize, and it’s hard to blame him. With less than a week to go until WrestleMania, he and Gable have found themselves a step behind in the sprint and not a lot of time to make up the distance.

Braun Strowman will have around 30 opponents in the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal, a surging Apollo Crews among them. But The Monster Among Men clearly only has eyes for two. Now that Colin Jost and Michael Che of “SNL” fame have been entered into the madcap over-the-top-rope scrum, The Gift of Destruction is openly fantasizing ways to make them suffer. This week, he even had two test subjects, local competitors whom he referred to and treated like “Colin Jost” and “Michael Che.” That meant throwing them over the top rope and bulldozing them with two charges around the ring before mercifully pinning the pair with a double Running Powerslam. There is some hope yet for the overmatched guest competitors: Battle Royals provide plenty of opportunity for flukes. But against this Strowman, Jost and Che may need something more along the lines of a miracle.

Bobby Lashley isn’t thrilled that Finn Bálor is challenging him for the Intercontinental Title at WrestleMania — after all, the dynamic Irishman didn’t pin him to get the bout. But Lashley and Lio Rush’s insistence that he has Bálor’s number under any and all circumstances might be a little misguided. While The All Mighty paid little respect to the idea of having to face Bálor’s infamous Demon at WrestleMania, he seemed a lot less confident when The Extraordinary Man transformed into his ghoulish alter-ego on the TitanTron, confirming The Demon’s presence at The Showcase of the Immortals. In fact, for all his well-earned bravado, the Intercontinental Champion had the look of a man who had talked himself into a world of trouble.