The knee-jerk reactions were inevitable upon the announcement of Saturday's Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor boxing pay-per-view match in June, when the former pound-for-pound king confirmed he will end a two-year retirement to face the UFC's reigning lightweight champion. 

Boxing's old guard of journalistic integrity -- myself included -- rushed to criticize Mayweather's transparent motives and remind how absurd it is to see the greatest fighter of his own era so willingly reduce his legacy by attempting to eclipse Rocky Marciano's revered 49-0 record against a novice who has yet to fight a professional round. 

Mayweather, 40, should've been better than this, I wrote in June, as if pleasing fans and meeting the specific standards of every critic's model champion was anything he had ever set out to do. 

In the end, that's where the revelatory light bulb became illuminated. 

If Mayweather (49-0, 26 KOs) has been one thing above all the rest, it's consistent. He has never tried to model step-for-step the careers of welterweight star contemporaries like Sugar Ray Leonard or Oscar De La Hoya. And despite sampling from his self-marketing pedigree, Mayweather has never tried to be this generation's Muhammad Ali. 

Mayweather has been in business for himself from the very beginning, not to be the champion of your dreams but the champion of his own. An equally brilliant defensive fighter and businessman, Floyd has figured out a way to "beat the game" from a financial and health standpoint in a sport that almost always takes away more from its competitors than it rewards. 

To that end, Mayweather -- with the constant references to himself as "TBE," or "The Best Ever" -- has carved out a legacy that is uniquely his own. That's why Saturday's fight against McGregor (21-3 in MMA) at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas (Showtime PPV, 9 p.m. ET) is ultimately the pinnacle of his career aspirations. This, in many ways, is his graduation. 

For Mayweather, it has never not been about the money. Heck, it's his actual nickname. And after years of deft matchmaking in constant search of the highest reward for the lowest risk, he found a dance partner in McGregor that he not only couldn't pass up, but in some ways has been searching for his entire career. 

McGregor, 29, the brash Irishman, can talk just as good (if not better) than Mayweather and brings with him an element of "great white hope" that can't be ignored, will play a role in the fight's promotional success. The fact that McGregor comes from an altogether different sport only makes him that more appealing to Mayweather because of his inexperience in boxing and the large fan base of mixed martial arts consumers he brings with him. 

Mayweather's run as the face of boxing hasn't always been pretty. His personal transgressions outside the ring have been well-documented and reprehensible. Inside of it, his unmatched dominance of the PPV business has done just as much harm for the sport as a whole as it has helped considering how rare his fights provided the entertainment value to justify the cost. 

But at some point, we need to tip our cap to Mayweather and acknowledge the success he has achieved in simply trying to be nothing but the best version of who he aimed to become: the best of his era, the richest prizefighter in history and the rare boxer who most expect will exit the sport for good on Saturday with his faculties intact and his grandchildren provided for. 

As Mayweather himself has often said, "numbers don't lie." And his record-breaking PPV run has been built upon the foundation of coercing his distractors into paying large sums of money for the simple hope of seeing him one day lose. Expect that business model to work brilliantly once more on Saturday as Mayweather once more has the last laugh -- all the way to the bank.