UFC President Dana White likes to say that the cruel thing about the fight game is how you show up one night and suddenly find out that you’ve gotten old.

We knew B.J. Penn had gotten old even before he showed up for Sunday’s UFC Fight Night 103 headliner, but for some reason, the powers that be insisted on seeing Yair Rodriguez prove it to us on live TV, an experiment that was about as surprising and enjoyable as taking a lit match to a Picasso just to see if it will burn.

Which is not to say that the FS1-televised bout inside Talking Stick Resort Arena in Phoenix was completely lacking in aesthetic beauty. What you see Rodriguez (9-1 MMA, 6-0 UFC) do inside the cage, that’s its own work of art. In just a shade more than one round of action, he kicked Penn (16-11-2 MMA, 12-10-2 UFC) everywhere but the soles of his feet, stopping him early in the second with a painful efficiency.

The kicking game of Rodriguez, you’ve got to admit it’s pretty. That’s where precision meets brutality, part sledgehammer and part scalpel, switching back and forth between the two as the need arises. If only he’d been wielding that weapon against someone else, it might have been possible to enjoy it.

But this was no fun. Not unless you had a grudge or a bet against Penn. Remember his last comeback attempt, when Frankie Edgar pummeled him into retirement and forced him to admit that he never should have stepped back into the cage in the first place? This was that, only without any of the elements that made that mini-tragedy feel in any way necessary or useful.

It was tough to feel much sympathy for Penn this time around. Yes, the 38-year-old was brilliant once and time stole that from him, the way it does to all great athletes, but he should have learned that lesson already. We all saw him learn it, and the lesson looked highly unpleasant. You go through that once, your stubbornness is almost endearing. You do it twice, it’s borderline infuriating.

It didn’t have to be this way, is the thing.

When Penn first insisted on this comeback, the UFC’s matchmaking strategy was kinder and gentler, more realistic. First he was given Dennis Siver, a contemporary who the UFC has no real interest in, and who these days exists mostly so that he can lose with dignity to more hype-worthy fighters. When that fell through, the pick was Cole Miller. After that, Ricardo Lamas.

You could feel it then, the way the UFC seemed to be either losing patience or changing strategy. Finally, someone decided that the thing to do was to turn the old into food for the young.

Let’s not kid ourselves; that’s what this was. Rodriguez has a future while all Penn has is a past. In the unforgiving lifeboat economy of the fight game, that’s usually when one man gets tossed overboard to make room for another.

There wasn’t much reason to expect this to go any other way. Rodriguez was too fast, too dangerous, too diverse in his attacks. Penn had the same stuff he’s always had, only less so. He was target practice and human sacrifice both, and he might have been the only person who didn’t know it.

He ought to know it now, though. The persistence of many MMA old-timers has shown us that there’s still a place for the fighters with more name than ability, but that place is not in a cage with some hungry young destroyer of worlds who’ll be even better tomorrow than he was today.

Penn can fight someone his own age if he’s that set on delaying the inevitable. But any talk of making another run at a belt now seems like a bad punchline.

None of this is new, of course. For fighters, this is an arc so typical that it’s hard to say whether it’s comforting or depressing.

On one hand, the pain and the disappointment that Penn must be feeling now are as much a part of the champion’s journey as the rise and the glory.

On the other, this has got to be the worst part. And it always comes at the very end, when it’s too late to change it, and when the best thing you can do is stop trying. Which, for some people, is also the hardest thing to do. Especially after a lifetime of being cheered for doing the opposite.

For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 103, check out the UFC Events section of the site.

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