There were 41 seconds left, and Jeremy Foley didn't want to watch anymore.
That's when UF's athletics director turned away from a team that couldn't advance the football three feet. A team that was less than one minute from witnessing giddy Mississippi players flocking to photographers and doing dances that would make Michael Jackson blush. A team whose hopes for an unblemished season vanished like the orange-and-blue-clad fans did from The Swamp. A team that now has a serious identity crisis.
Now it's time to page Dr. Tebow for help, and this is going to require more minute cuts than what he did over the summer when he gave circumcisions to Filipino babies.
For Tebow, that's going to be about as easy as it would be for him to renounce God. Because it's certainly not easy to help 120 other sweat-drenched football players who were refusing to take off their pads as they sat in a hushed locker room.
"It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop," cornerback Joe Haden said after the humbling 31-30 loss against Mississippi on Saturday.
Don't fret, there were enough Rebel whoops and hoots going on a few hundred feet outside if you didn't care for silence.
Now you probably want some good news: The Gators (3-1, 1-1 Southeastern Conference) can still win the SEC East if they win out. The good part about being in a competitive division is that one game may not tarnish your entire season. Especially when the only two undefeated teams in your division are Kentucky and Vanderbilt.
Now the bad news: Urban Meyer has developed a cliché plan to win - great defense, win turnovers, score in the red zone and have a good kicking game - that was running like a well-oiled Porsche. On Saturday, that Porsche turned into a clunking '83 Geo.
"It looked like they followed our plan to win, and we didn't," UF offensive coordinator Dan Mullen said.
The devastation was evident. When Tebow was about to enter the postgame conference room, he peeked inside, and then turned back. The door slammed shut. He would enter a few minutes later with his normally blue eyes swollen red.
"You heard me talk after the Tennessee game about how well we did with not putting our defense in bad positions and not turning it over," a weary Tebow said. "We did that this game."
So now Arkansas gets to have fun with a very upset Tebow this week. Maybe this is just the kick Gainesville's version of Superman needed.
"I already know our team will come out there and practice their ass off," center Maurkice Pouncey said. "Who said we was going to go undefeated this year? That wasn't written down in no law book or anything like that."
Regardless, for the first time this season, UF didn't have everything go its way.
The Gators couldn't depend on any interceptions care of Tennessee quarterback Jonathan Crompton to bail themselves out or hope a Miami team would never decide to throw more than a 10-yard down-and-out rout.
"I want (this game) to stay in our hearts and keep hurting," Tebow said.
If this game seemed familiar, it should have. Far too many times, fans remember, the small aspects of the game have cost the Gators dearly. Now, once again, Meyer is faced with a team at a fork in the road.
"It's not the adversity or it's not the injuries that you have to worry about happening," Meyer said during Sunday's teleconference. "Those are all going to happen. Every year in the history of college football, it's all happened. It's how a team, how a player, how an athlete, how a program reacts to it."
For an Arkansas team that just got shellacked 52-10 against Texas, it's going to be about two teams reacting Saturday.
And maybe this time Foley won't have to leave the field early.
