In professional wrestling, the phrase “card subject to change” is pretty standard.

You never know, even in scripted sports, if an injury can throw the entire show’s trajectory into chaos, sometimes affecting every other story going on.

In some scenarios, stories can pivot and change based upon crowd reactions, both positive and negative, even despite WWE’s best efforts to make fans believe that they don’t care what fans think of what they’re doing with their product.

And then we have this seemingly random, out-of-the-blue ending to the most talked about heel turn of the past several years.

John Cena, the consummate good guy of WWE since his debut over 20 years ago, had been a bad guy for the first time in his career since low-blowing Cody Rhodes at the “Elimination Chamber” event in February. He went on to win his record-setting 17th world title over Rhodes at “WrestleMania 41” and defended it on several shows this spring and summer.

But then, just days before “SummerSlam” and after Rhodes asked to face the “real” John Cena in a title rematch, Cena does an about-face and is now a good guy again?

I won’t rehash my whole column from before, but the whole beginning of this story was clunky and unnecessary. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and rapper Travis Scott came out at the chamber so Cena could “sell his soul” and set up the Mania 41 main event, only for Rocky to no-show WrestleMania entirely. Travis Scott showed up for the slowest interference run-in of all time and helped Cena beat Rhodes, but neither of them have been seen on WWE programming since, and Rock said that this was the plan the whole time?

And then, after Cena was left all alone to continue this heel turn through the summer that really did seem forced at times, even by Cena himself, it’s just randomly over. The only passing mention of the dead story came from Cena’s promo after his face turn where he accepts Rhodes’ challenge: “The only Platinum rapper showing up to whip your ass on Sunday is me.”

It’s a real shame that one of the actual greatest of all time had to spend over half of his final year of in-ring competition trying to be a bad guy – which admittedly, was something I wrote before about wanting to see – but this was just poorly executed.

My theory is Johnson set all of this up to mess with Rhodes after his “finishing the story” at “WrestleMania 40” ruined plans the company had for Rock and his cousin, Roman Reigns, to face off … not that anyone actually wants to see that anyway. And as if to throw some rotten icing on a cake missing flour and sugar, how does WWE choose to end its first two-night “SummerSlam?”

They bring back Brock Lesnar, again, to close the show and destroy Cena after he hasn’t been on television in over two years, and why was that?

So they can have him and Cena go one-on-one; and it probably works better with Cena as a good guy, yes, but do we really need Lesnar back in the company for a couple of months just to have a nostalgia match? There are plenty of guys that could use the John Cena rub that aren’t going to be getting it now, and it isn’t like Lesnar needs the publicity or money. The dude seemed to be really happy working as a hobby butcher and watching his daughter become a miniature version of him.

So why did we need any of this to begin with? Well, apparently it wasn’t working with the creative minds in Connecticut.

Dave Meltzer said on Wrestling Observer Radio recently: “They dropped (Cena’s heel story) because it sucked, but also, because a John Cena-Brock Lesnar program, which is obviously what they’re doing, does work better with Brock Lesnar as the heel.”

And if they truly did plan all of this from the beginning, the heel turn, to me, really just seems like it was all just a major waste of time.

Digital content coordinator and copy editor Dan Isenberg can be reached at disenberg@altoonamirror.com or on X @TheseDanTweets.