Imagine sitting backstage in a locker room, getting your hands wrapped as you wait for your first professional fight. Imagine making that walk out while all these people watch, either in the venue or through a screen, knowing that when you’re done, there will be someone waiting with some pretty nasty intentions in a cage.

Now imagine doing that with particularly bright lights surrounding, in a particularly big venue, with a particularly large number of people watching at home, and against a particularly skilled opponent.

That isn’t a very common occurrence in MMA, where fighters tend to be brought up in smaller, regional promotions before making it to the big stage. But it’s the experience of a handful of promising athletes, commonly stand-outs in previous sports or in amateur competition, who get picked up early on.

A lot of those can be found at Bellator, a stable for untapped talent in which a lot of young fighters with little to no previous experience in pro MMA get a unique chance to grow already under the bright lights. As a result, some of the coolest highlight-reel moments we’ve had this year so far were courtesy of some of Bellator’s up-and-comers.

Let’s take a look at some.

Pico’s vicious body shot at Bellator 192

Aaron Pico (4-1 MMA, 4-1 BMMA) had some spotlight experience before Bellator. He’d already built a name for himself as a wrestling stud, coming up just short on qualifying for the 2016 Olympic Games, and was a junior Golden Gloves champion in boxing. At 20, the buzz around Pico was neither discreet nor unwarranted.

Pico’s MMA debut, however, didn’t go as planned: He was upset by Zach Freeman, losing via first-round choke. When Pico came back, though, he did so with a vengeance. First, he closed out 2017 with a picture-perfect left hook landed on Justin Linn. And then he made sure to kick off 2018 in similarly destructive fashion, with a body shot for the ages landed on Shane Kruchten (via Twitter).

The devastating blow was MMAjunkie’s “Knockout of the Month” for January – and a hell of a way to distance himself from that debut loss.