The Undertaker didn’t show up on the last Raw before WrestleMania, so what now?

There have been some times that WWE has pushed things to almost the last minute before finalizing a WrestleMania match, but what’s going on with Undertaker and John Cena is taking it to a whole new level.

Despite the fact that many WWE fans would have been just fine if Undertaker, now 53, called it a career after WrestleMania 33, they also would be super thrilled to see him at the pay-per-view that has defined his career even more than it does for many other wrestlers. The build-up for a match between him and John Cena at WrestleMania 34 has been fun as well.

There’s just one problem, and it’s a pretty big one: After Undertaker didn’t show up on the final Raw before the show of shows on Monday night in Atlanta, it’s left us all wondering if there really is going to be a match after all.

As he’s done for weeks now, Cena came out, insisted he’d be fine if Undertaker turned him down but looking for some kind of response from the Dead man. He whipped the Atlanta fans into a frenzy chanting for the Phenom, then turned to insulting him and questioning his manhood.

Did we get the bells? Was there darkness and smoke and lightning? No, no there was not.

With ‘Taker not wrestling since WrestleMania 33, appearing only to talk briefly at Raw 25, this was always going to be a one-sided build with Cena doing the heavy lifting. Once we got down to the stretch run, the thinking was that it might be until we were just six days out from New Orleans before Undertaker made an appearance. Yet that show has now come and gone.

So now what? The last hope, some fans think, is that something might come together at the Hall of Fame ceremony on Friday night. With Kid Rock getting inducted, the theory is that maybe the “American Badass” Undertaker will show up and (finally) accept Cena’s challenge there. That would be cutting it as close as WWE has ever cut it for such a high profile bout.

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We’ll see. Everyone knows that there won’t be a WrestleMania without Cena, and there wouldn’t have been all this time spent on hyping a potential collision with neither man actually getting in the ring. Something is going to happen, but who knows exactly what that will be at this point.