Let’s try again.

For the second year in a row, the UFC has booked Jon Jones to defend his heavyweight title against former two-time champion Stipe Miocic for its annual event at Madison Square Garden, UFC CEO Dana White said in an interview with Complex published Saturday.

“Jon Jones will fight at Madison Square Garden in November,” White told the outlet.

The new fight, which will headline UFC 309 on November 16, is a replacement for the original 2023 booking, which was torpedoed by a pectoral muscle injury to Jones just over two weeks before UFC 295.

White has insisted that the Jones-Miocic fight was rescheduled as the champion’s first fight since undergoing surgery to repair his injury. And even before White’s confirmation in the hours before UFC 306 on Saturday at The Sphere in Las Vegas, signs were pointing to the fight actually taking place at the Garden.

The highly focused plan to ensure the fight between the two heavyweights for the championship was implemented despite months of complaints from fans and the media that this fight was less relevant after Tom Aspinall’s rise to interim champion.

Jones, the longtime former light heavyweight champion who won the vacant title last March after defending champion Francis Ngannou parted ways with the promotion, insists that the fight against Miocic, who won the heavyweight crown in both 2016 and 2019 but has not competed since losing the belt to Ngannou by knockout in 2021, is a fight that further adds to his already impressive legacy.

Many have speculated that one or both of Jones and Miocic could decide to hang up their gloves after the fight – more likely in the case of the 42-year-old Miocic than in the case of the 37-year-old Jones.

Englishman Aspinall won the interim title, created to fill a gap in the UFC 295 title fight following Jones’ injury, on November 11 last year at the Garden when he knocked out hard-hitting Russian Sergei Pavlovich in the first round.

Aspinall, at 30 years old still relatively young for a top-class heavyweight, has been vocal about his desire to face Jones and unify their titles.

The Manchester native successfully defended his interim title in July when he knocked out Curtis Blaydes in round 1.

White admitted to Complex that the next step for the UFC 309 headliner and his promotion’s interim heavyweight champion is uncertain nearly two months before the squad’s eighth visit to the Garden.

“If (Jones) or Stipe wins, then we’ll see what happens next, who retires, whatever,” White said.

However, the UFC’s leading mouthpiece has his thoughts on how Jones, who hails from Endicott, NY but lives and trains in New Mexico, and Miocic, who also works as a firefighter in Ohio, would proceed after their long-delayed clash of the titans.

“Do I think Stipe will quit? I do. I think he will. But you never know. Stipe might want to take the challenge (against Aspinall),” White said. “But I know for sure that if Jon Jones wins this fight and all the talk is going around about it, there’s no way he’s going to fight Aspinall.”