How it unfolded
In one round of a semifinal, Daigo Umehara's Ken was left with almost no health remaining. Because blocking a Super Art in this game still applies chip damage, the moment Justin Wong's Chun-Li unleashed a 15-hit Super Art, Kikoken, simply guarding would have sealed Daigo's defeat. His only way out was to parry every hit. Parrying requires pushing the stick forward on the exact frame an attack lands, and landing fifteen consecutive parries was, until that moment, considered a theoretical possibility rather than something achievable in a real match. Daigo parried the grounded hits one by one, then parried the final aerial hit while airborne himself, landed, and immediately punished with a full combo to turn the round around. The crowd erupted. The clip was distributed as the 37th file in the tournament's highlight reel, giving it the name EVO Moment 37, and it spread as a shared file well before YouTube existed.
Why it still matters
This was the first clip that could explain the difficulty and tension of esports to someone who did not play the game at all. Because the crowd's reaction alone conveys what happened even without knowing the rules, this clip became the standard reference used to introduce esports for more than two decades. It also cemented EVO's status as a pilgrimage site for the fighting-game community.