OXFORD, Miss. — The biggest day ever here began with blue skies and full hearts and everything you could ever want while strolling through The Grove amid the beautiful people in this tiny hamlet.
Then the world turned upside down and before you knew it, the Wicked Witch was dead.
For a week, anyway.
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If we learn one thing from Ole Miss' heart-stopping, champagne-popping, once in a lifetime, white-knuckle victory over SEC king Alabama, it’s this: it all begins again next week.
“It’s not over,” says Ole Miss tight end Evan Engram. “It’s just getting started.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of life in the SEC West Division, where this two-month grind of whistling through the graveyard began in the state of Mississippi on Saturday afternoon, and if you blink, you just might miss the Rebels and Bulldogs — Good Gosh, almighty, Ole Miss and Mississippi State — in the top five of the college football world.
Hemingway himself couldn’t have written this script any better. But if he had, it would stop right here, in this very moment, among the sea of long-suffering fans and empty whiskey bottles and torn down goalposts. A satisfying, slow tug on a strong Hotty Toddy.
Enjoy it now, Ole Miss. Soak it in, Mississippi State. Because next week, it only ratchets up another notch.
Ole Miss plays at Texas A&M, which was blown out Saturday in Starkville, and Mississippi State plays host to Auburn, which more than likely will begin the week as the No. 1 team in the nation after top five Oregon, Oklahoma, Alabama and Texas A&M all lost on — for now — the biggest weekend of the season. Deep breath, everyone. We’ll get through this.
Alabama, which sustained its earliest loss of the season since coach Nick Saban’s first year in Tuscaloosa (2007), plays at Arkansas — which had the week off and must rebound from a tripping penalty against Texas A&M last week that turned a 21-point lead into overtime destruction.
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A suggestion for the new — and no doubt highly controversial — College Football Playoff selection committee: start with the SEC West. And work your way back to the rest of the field.
“We better put this one in the trash can quick,” said Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze, the man who was born in Oxford, went to school at Southern Miss and always knew fate would bring him back here to coach his hometown team. “Because we’re going to get an angry (Texas A&M) next week.”
If there’s one problem with the SEC flexing its muscle (again) on the college football world, it’s the annoying collateral damage of moving forward and eliminating celebration. The narrative already has switched from Alabama being Alabama, to which West team wins the division with two losses?
And if there’s any program in the SEC that needs to stop for a few hours and reflect, it’s Ole Miss.
The team that hasn’t played in the SEC Championship Game. The program that watched a coach (Tommy Tuberville) leave after he insisted the only way he’d leave was in a pine box, and fire another coach (Houston Nutt) two years after he won back-to-back Cotton Bowls.
The university that, to this day, still is crushed over the paralyzing injury and eventual death of Chucky Mullins. A wound more than two decades in the making, and one that will never fade, no matter what happens every fall Saturday.
“People would ask me, why did you go to Ole Miss?” said defensive tackle Robert Nkemdiche, the nation’s No. 1 recruit two years ago. “It takes a special kind of person to see what can happen. We have a lot of guys on this team that could have gone to Alabama or any other big school, but we decided to stake our claim here.”
It finally happened on Saturday; it finally happened even after Alabama took an early lead and got a big break (a missed facemask call led to a Tide touchdown) — and after Freeze admitted he felt shaky after his decision to not sit on the ball in the final seconds of the first half led to the defensive touchdown that shouldn’t have happened (see: facemask) but did and gave Alabama a 14-3 lead.
This is what Alabama does better than anyone. They walk in your house, eat your food and kick your dog and stroll away leaving tattered dreams and broken hearts. “We had the game where we wanted it,” said Alabama tight end Brian Volger.
Not this time.
This moment belonged to Bo Wallace, the fiery Ole Miss quarterback who has absorbed the insulting moniker of Good Bo/Bad Bo — for his confounding inconsistencies in big situations. Only this time, Wallace was the one driving Ole Miss down the field on two fourth quarter drives that ended in touchdown passes.
Wallace was the one who, with Ole Miss facing third-and-goal from the 10, went to the sideline during a timeout and told Freeze the play he wanted to run. Seconds later, he threw a beautiful fade to Jaylen Walton — “It felt like it hung up there forever,” Walton said — that gave Ole Miss the biggest win in program history.
This moment belonged to Nkemdiche and Laquon Treadwell and Laremy Tunsil and those other elite recruits who took a huge leap of faith and bought into what Freeze was selling. It belonged to the seniors on this team, the group that began their Ole Miss careers with a 2-10 whitewash of a season, and were taken aback by this new young coach with his work harder than anyone else philosophy.
It belonged to cornerback Senquez Golson, whose spectacular interception in the end zone in the closing seconds sealed this dream of a victory. The same Golson who three years ago was nearly run out of town.
In fact, Freeze said he wanted to kick him off the team, and Golson said he thought long and hard about a professional baseball contract the Boston Red Sox were offering.
“You look down at that paper and see all those commas and all those zeroes, it’s hard to turn that down,” Golson said.
But that was Golson early Saturday night, standing on a chair in the middle of the locker room and preaching to his teammates that it’s not over. It’s only going to get bigger week after week.
“Everyone expects to win now, and that’s contagious” Treadwell said. “It’s the new normal.”
For a week, anyway.
Or maybe a whole lot longer.