To borrow a line from The Usual Suspects, “and just like that…he’s gone.” Well, maybe not “he” in this case, but it’s gone, and that it is the rematch between Nick Diaz and Carlos Condit.

What seemed like an almost sure thing late Tuesday night has evaporated before our very eyes as, according to the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Nick Diaz has tested positive for “marijuana metabolites.”

Some will claim that the rematch should have never even been discussed in the first place, while others will opine that the rematch should have been booked before Diaz and Condit even walked out of the Mandalay Bay Events Center on Saturday, February 4.

The question now moves from should Diaz and Condit fight toward what does the UFC do with Nick Diaz? He’ll be subject to whatever suspension the Nevada State Athletic Commission deems acceptable, but will there be additional punishment doled out by the UFC?

If it was just this suspension, relating to the failed drug test, I would say, no, he would serve his NSAC time away from the sport and then he would be eligible to come back and step into the Octagon, much like Chael Sonnen did with his recent suspension, but there’s more to it with Diaz.

Ever since he signed with the UFC he’s been a thorn in the organization’s side. He cost the promotion countless dollars when he blew off media obligations and forced the UFC to remove him from the UFC 137 main event. He wasn’t cut then; he was instead booked to face BJ Penn in the co-main event a fight that eventually became the main event when Georges St-Pierre was forced to withdraw due to injury.

His actions after that fight, where he called St-Pierre out from the center of the Octagon after his win over Penn, had St-Pierre so incensed that the champion begged White and Zuffa CEO Lorenzo Fertitta to allow him to fight Diaz. This caused the cancellation of St-Pierre’s scheduled fight against Condit, another fight that never came to fruition due to another St-Pierre injury.

And now we have this, Diaz failing a drug test, the second failed drug test of his MMA career, the first coming after he defeated Takanori Gomi via Gogoplata at Pride 33 back in February 2007. For that positive test, also for marijuana, Diaz was suspended for six months and his victory was changed to a no contest.

There will be howling from both sides on this subject. One side will want to see Diaz released, the other will say past precedent should allow him to stay, and then there is the elephant in the room, FOX. Will FOX have a say in Diaz’s fate since it is now the UFC’s network TV partner?

The rematch between Diaz and Condit may have disappeared, but this just the start of things for Nick Diaz.

Esther Lin for Strikeforce

As far as retirement speeches go, Nick Diaz’s at the conclusion of his five-round bout with Carlos Condit left something to be desired.

Diaz, frustrated with how the fight played out, stood in the center of the Octagon and said: “I don’t need this sh*t. I pushed this guy backwards. He ran from me the whole fight. He ran this whole fight. I landed the harder shots. He ran the whole time. He kicked me in the leg with little baby leg kicks the whole fight. That’s the way they understand to win in here. I don’t want to play this game no more.”

The jury is out on whether or not Diaz will actually hang up the gloves and, to borrow a phrase from Mike Tyson, “fade into Bolivian,” but if he does, it will be a huge loss for the sport of mixed martial arts.

Love him or hate him—judging from the crowd noise coming from the Mandalay Bay Events Center at UFC 143, far more people love Diaz than hate him—he will be missed when he’s gone.

Diaz is the person that many long to be. There’s no pretense in his words or actions, there’s no thought of how he’ll look in the press or to his employer nor is their any consideration to the repercussions of his actions. A thought pops in his head and the words come out unfiltered.

How many of us have wished we could do what Nick Diaz does?

Both those that love him and hate him will miss Diaz’s off-the-cuff remarks during interviews, but where he’ll truly be missed is inside the Octagon.

The UFC seems to be experiencing a sea change these days, as fighters no longer enter the cage to see who the better fighter is, but instead are competing to decide who the better athlete is.

Some will say this is natural progression, turning MMA into a sport like all other sports, where the win is the most important thing. Others will bemoan the change, saying that as a combat sport, the intent should not be simply to gain a victory, but should be about leaving it all in the cage win or lose.

Both of the above theories have their merit, but as the sport attempts to break into the mainstream, we’ll probably see more and more fighters employing game plans akin to the one Carlos Condit used to defeat Nick Diaz on Saturday.

This is why we’ll all miss Nick Diaz. For all his perceived faults, he was a fighter that had one plan: Win or lose, he was going to leave it in the cage. If you polled fans and fighters, you would find that many would say that a Nick Diaz fight was a can’t-miss fight, that he was never in a boring fight.

As more and more fights start to edge toward technical battles where the win is the most important thing, Diaz was a throwback, a “just scrap” kind of fighter in a world of automatons just doing what their trainer has game-planned them to do.

Some will say good riddance to Diaz, proclaiming he was overrated and overpaid, a loud-mouth miscreant, an ingrate who refused to play the game. Others will say that Diaz was misunderstood, that his love for fighting and training is what really mattered.

Whichever side you fall on, you may not realize it now, but in time you will pine for the days that a scowling Nick Diaz stalked his opponent inside the cage.