By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
Katie Taylor has spent nearly two decades turning Irish arenas into cauldrons of noise. Saturday in Dublin, by all accounts, is meant to be the last time.
Taylor faces Flora Pili in what's being framed as her farewell fight, and BBC Sport gathered predictions from figures across the boxing world ahead of the bout. The undisputed lightweight champion has built a career on nights exactly like this one — hometown crowd, something to prove, a nation watching.
What's clear is the stakes: this is being treated, by the sport that made her famous, as a closing chapter for one of the defining boxers of her generation.
Taylor's résumé speaks for itself — an Olympic gold medalist who became a two-weight world champion and a fixture of some of the biggest nights in women's boxing history. A farewell fight on home soil, against an opponent in Pili who will have her own reasons for wanting to spoil the script, is the kind of occasion that doesn't need embellishment.
Whether Saturday closes the book or merely turns a page, Dublin will be loud. That much is safe to predict.
Final score's the last thing that mattered here.
— Compiled from reporting by BBC Sport.
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