The story is as old as punk itself. Scrappy band debuts in seedy club; band slowly attracts a small but devoted number of fans; band plays to intimate crowds; band gets picked up by major record label; fans begin hurling beer bottles at band in disgust.

In disgust of what? Talk to the denizens of Northern California, the providence that gave birth to Green Day, and they’ll tell you the band “sold out,” that they turned their back on everything the punk philosophy stands for. Mainstream success was a scarlet letter. They belonged to the punk scene, Goddammit, and how dare they leave us behind.

Please be assured you haven’t accidentally stumbled onto the Rolling Stone website. Substitute Billie Joe and the gang for mixed martial arts and one group of manic fans for another and you’ve got the idea.

Our lil’ sport is all growed up, and some of us can’t handle it.

Witness the endless browbeating after Saturday’s cable broadcast. The Chicken Littles were in full cluck mode, lambasting Zuffa for everything from too many commercials (not their fault) to premature ref stoppages (also not their fault) to simply having the overall gall to host an event on free television. A mediocre main event (certainly not a first for any promotion) was seen as the UFC equivalent of cracking Capone’s empty vault.

When the term “mountains out of molehills” was coined, you can be assured it was likely in response to some fight fan’s bitching.

It’s not the UFC that isn’t ready for primetime — it’s the fans. “Ultimate Fight Night” scored a healthy 1.5 rating, which was enough to win the cable war for that particular evening and on par with expectations for the graveyard shift that is Saturday night.

Read the recaps on the forums, though, and you’d expect a debacle on the level of UFC 33. Despite viewership actually increasing as the night wore on, peaking with the main event, forum pundits will swear up and down that the show was a disappointment.

In a way, it was. With Saturday being the second time a live UFC event broke the two million households mark, it’s quickly outgrowing the embrace of the “insiders,” those intuitive few who have followed the sport since the beginning.

Don’t lie to yourself: You know you found some degree of satisfaction in being privy to an underground sport. While the masses sat in awe of Lennox Lewis, you took pride in knowing he’d be mat paste against Mark Coleman (Pictures). When your workplace buddies gathered around and talked about their purple belts in Karate, you snickered, feeling like the superior intellect.

Among your social circle, you were the one who was enlightened.

But that’s slowly ebbing away, isn’t it? Some weeks, UFC programming takes up nearly as much airtime as the WWE. Subtle, hip references to fighters like Chuck Liddell (Pictures) are showing up in network shows like “CSI.” When someone brings up the fighting prowess of Roy Jones at the water cooler, you might not be the first guy to invoke Matt Hughes (Pictures).

And you hate it. Because these people weren’t there from the beginning. They didn’t drop $1,000 in DirecTV hardware costs. They didn’t suffer through the catcalls in some dingy, lurid arena in the middle of nowhere. They’ve never stayed up until four o’clock on the morning to find out if Sakuraba beat another Gracie. They didn’t earn it.

And so the solution is to snipe endlessly at every move the UFC makes, downplaying any significant progressive movement. It’s a defense mechanism. An ex gaining five pounds isn’t going to go unnoticed by a former flame; likewise, the UFC hosting a bummer of a main event is going to be fodder for endless prattling.

The promotion is hardly above criticism, but the exhaustive hyper-analysis of every second of every show goes above and beyond the call of duty.

Fans can say they’ve wanted this for a long time, that they wanted fighters to earn a good living and snag the big endorsement deals, but now that it’s happening, they’re significantly less enthused.

The expectations were too high: Success to the hardcores implies that the UFC would run out and hand blank checks to the marquee names and we’d get to see the Big Fights. The UFC is no longer about finding out who the best fighter in the world is (if it ever was) — it’s about creating a palatable piece of entertainment for a mass audience.

“The Ultimate Fighter” has created a feeder star system for the show, and it makes perfect business sense to pay Forrest Griffin (Pictures) $30,000 for a fight when he’ll draw more viewers than, say, a PRIDE fighter and his accompanying $300,000 price tag.

Quite frankly, the casual fan won’t know what they‘re missing. And while the devotees will froth at the mouth, it really doesn’t make any difference. PRIDE may be filet mignon to the UFC’s hamburger for some, but that creepy clown has no problem pushing millions of those little grease sandwiches every year.

The doom generation will continue to snipe, swearing up and down this fight or that stoppage will sound the death knell; that since the UFC doesn’t cater to their own specific tastes, it’s destined to fail. It’s baseless and petty. The fans that could tell you Dana White’s suit size represent less than 1 percent of the viewing audience for a typical episode of the SpikeTV shows.

Becoming obsolete is a frightening thing. The insulated nature of MMA fandom fed a sense of ownership. The line between the business and the consumer was blurred. And in many ways, the intimacy that kept this thing afloat is now what’s to blame for fans trying to exert a bizarre degree of control over a product that no longer relies on their devotion.

It’s not just our thing anymore, gang. Chuck Liddell (Pictures) is probably a year away from snapping into a Slim Jim; Forrest Griffin (Pictures) is destined for a TV Guide cover; the UFC itself seems positioned to become a major player in the cable industry. Things will continue to march on, with or without the support of a jilted fan base.

The band was yours for over a decade. It’s time to let go.

In Brief, Special UFN Edition:

Congrats to Sam Hoger (Pictures) for putting on a better-than-expected performance in “The Battle of the Beanies” against fan favorite Stephan Bonnar (Pictures). Hoger’s persona may be abrasive, but he’s got guts. … Way too much energy was expended in complaining over Cecil Peoples’ decision to halt the Quarry-Sell bout. MMA officiating will always will be a subjective vocation. And pound-for-pound, nothing beats the Oyama-Silva stoppage as the clinical definition of premature. It’s not exclusively a UFC problem. Learn to accept it. … For the second time, the UFC seems oblivious to the fact that many free TV viewers are first-timers, and pass up the obvious tact of creating some kind of brief MMA primer for the uninitiated. It‘s inexplicable. … With TUF alumni going 4-0 Saturday, it seems likely that Joe Silva has found something in the game of Brian Gassaway (Pictures) for contract winner Diego Sanchez (Pictures) to exploit. Don’t expect to see any surprises there. … Salaverry paid the price for holding back in his fight against Marquardt, getting cut from the UFC roster. The message seems pretty clear: Don’t bury the promotion on free TV. It’s unfortunate the otherwise exciting Salaverry had to be the messenger.

The opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com