When she stepped into the cage for the biggest fight in the history of women’s MMA, Gina Carano couldn’t feel the canvas under her feet. A strange sensation. Not unpleasant, in other circumstances, but this was not the time. Nearly 14,000 people were in HP Pavilion in San Jose, Calif., and more than half a million more watching on Showtime – all of them held rapt by the promise of seeing MMA’s poster girl with the toothpaste-commercial smile go up against a true force of nature, both unstoppable force and immovable object, the woman who needed only one name: “Cyborg.” A bad time for Carano to feel suddenly and irrevocably disconnected from her body, and yet there she was, seemingly floating a few inches off the canvas. “I felt high on a drug I’d never had before,” Carano told MMAjunkie this week. “I might’ve enjoyed that feeling had I not been in front of thousands of people, getting ready to fight, and had ‘Cyborg’ staring across the cage at me.” Cris “Cyborg” Santos (now known as Cristiane Justino , following a divorce from her husband, Evangelista Santos), watched her from the opposite corner, thinking about all the people who would much rather see Carano win
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Today in MMA History: When ‘Cyborg’ met Carano, and women’s MMA reached a new pinnacle – MMA Junkie