On the Tuesday prior to their historic third bout at Madison Square Garden, Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano held their open workouts at The Oculus at the site of the World Trade Center. The symbolism of what their rivalry represents was everywhere you looked.

For one, an event promoting women’s boxing was inside a shopping mall that sees more than 300,000 people walk through it each day, a sign that the sport is indeed now commercial, as a ring was placed in front of the Breitling and Hugo Boss stores on the ground floor.

Even more on the nose were the 50-plus foot inflatable versions of Taylor and Serrano towering over the entire mall, a ready-made Instagram post for all the passers-by, but a physical representation of two giants of women’s sport as a whole, looking down upon the undercard participants for whom they kicked the door open before shattering the glass ceiling above them, too.

Two days later, Taylor and Serrano fought for the third time, this time headlining a broadcast on Netflix, the world’s largest streaming service. Suddenly, the two of them were at the center of a world that, upon their entry into it as children, struggled to acknowledge women as boxers, let alone center them in the sports and entertainment ecosystem for even a brief moment.

Women had only been licensed to box professionally in the state of New York for less than a decade by the time Taylor and Serrano were born. In 1978, Cathy “Cat” Davis, Lady Tyger Trimiar and Jackie Tonawanda became the first women granted a license to box in the state, 56 years after the first woman, Leanna La Mar, had applied for one.

The clerical victory wouldn’t have happened without a number of lawsuits against the state, involvement from the Human Rights Commission, and frankly, a little creativity, shall we say, on the women’s applications. Some of Davis’ fights were alleged to have been fixed, and some of Tonawanda’s claims may have been tall tales as well.

Ultimately, those were sins of necessity. Without a path to actually prove their worth as athletes to commissioner Edwin Dooley, who declared in court that “licensing of women as professional boxers would at once destroy the image that attracts serious boxing fans and bring professional boxing into disrepute," and to even have the chance to do things on the up-and-up in the state, some embellishment was necessary. If not for that trio of women, it’s unclear when, or even if, things would have changed.

Taylor and Serrano never had to fake anything in their careers — their accomplishments and performances even before their trilogy were documented, celebrated and compensated, albeit not at a rate they wanted or deserved. However, they know something about having to go above and beyond just to be accepted as equal.

Their first bout in 2022 was perhaps the year’s absolute best regardless of gender, and produced an electric atmosphere inside MSG that is talked about to this day by those lucky enough to be within it. Their second bout, one of the most-watched women’s sports contests of all-time as the co-feature to Jake Paul-Mike Tyson, wound up stealing the show on a rare night in which boxing had become monoculture by producing historical punch output.

Taylor and Serrano are among the most accomplished and decorated fighters in the sport of boxing, male or female, with evidently massive fanbases. Yet, it’s unclear if there would have been a Tyson undercard, a Netflix, another multi-million dollar payday, if the first fight hadn’t been as thrilling as it was. It wasn’t uncommon to hear things like “I don’t normally like women’s boxing, but that was damn good” the Sunday morning afterwards. Sheer excellence, at least at that point, wasn’t enough. The women had to be otherworldly, or more pertinently, more exciting than the men both times.

The third bout took an entirely different tenor. The two women boxed more strategically, as they’d hinted at during fight week, using more movement and caution. From a sheerly strategic point of view, it made sense. From Serrano’s perspective, her hyper-aggressive approach in the first two bouts hadn’t managed to conclusively appeal to the judges, so she felt as though she needed to try something different. In Taylor’s case, her indomitable fighting spirit compelled her to try to compete with Serrano’s outrageous punch output, and it nearly cost her both times.

But there was likely something deeper at play, too. As they looked up at superhuman-sized depictions of themselves as they greeted the public for the first time during fight week, they likely realized that they weren’t just stars in the boxing galaxy. They no longer had to prove to anyone that they could be in the orbit of men. In fact, they were now the sun around which their contemporaries orbited. Taylor and Serrano were no longer tasked with being in charge of proving that women could fight, that they could headline, that they could be entertaining. Now, they could just box.

So that’s what Taylor did, grinding out a hard-nosed but disciplined performance en route to a majority decision in the trilogy bout, earning a sweep of the rivalry.

A sign of true equality is when the previously disadvantaged party is given the leeway to be “normal” and still exist. To be clear, Taylor and Serrano are, and were on Friday night, anything but “normal.” They are two of the three greatest women’s boxers to ever live, and remain so even at present time.

But both were able to fight one another without the added pressure of being the swing vote on the referendum on their gender’s ability to box, let alone be in the main event. They no longer needed to prove that they were worth millions — they already were — and that the gate doubled from the first time they sold out the same venue three years prior spoke for them on that front.

That larger victory was clearly not out of their minds, though. During the open workout, Serrano heard the sound of the crowd, a pitch or two higher than we’re used to hearing it at, and remarked that it was “the sound of the door opening” for women.

As Ariel Helwani turned to Serrano following the bout, after Taylor had celebrated her win, she rushed through the necessities of quickly analyzing the bout before launching into a soliloquy of celebration about how far they’d come, of the rights they’d earned. Tucked within the emotion and the jubilation was the sound of relief of someone who no longer had to hold the door open by also fighting the people off who were trying the close it. The women she and Taylor loomed over were in the room now, and there was no threat of being kicked out if they didn’t guard the door anymore.

"It was truly an amazing night for all of us women, said Serrano. "We did it baby, we did it. We made history. I'm proud of each and every one of you."