Katie Taylor did not lose her way out of boxing. She left the way almost nobody in the sport gets to, undisputed at 40, WBA, IBF and WBO super-lightweight belts still hers, on a Saturday night in Dublin with Croke Park packed for a fighter instead of a football final. This is her third time unifying a division across a career that started with an Olympic gold in London in 2012 and ends with a homecoming she got to script herself. Most boxers get carried out on a stretcher of diminishing purses and a promoter's indifference. Taylor got a stadium.

Here is the number the trophy ceremony did not mention: male fighters with a fraction of Taylor's résumé have commanded ten times her purse for a single undercard appearance, and it took two decades of headlining her own cards to force Croke Park to sell out for a woman's fight rather than host one as a favor to the men above her. Taylor's retirement closes the account on a career spent proving the sport's economics wrong one sold ticket at a time, not on winning the argument that women's boxing should have paid her that way from the start. She leaves the belts undisputed. The pay gap she fought against remains unresolved for the fighters coming after her.