The ball never touched the floor after it left Jahmai Mashack's hands.
The Tennessee guard, moments after stepping infront of a Florida pass, was seemingly suspended in the air for a moment, hovering over courtside spectators who had a front row seat to the play that defined the No. 8 Vols’ 64-44 triumph of the No. 5 Gators at Food City Center Saturday.
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Mashack saved the ball from landing in their laps, changing its course to mid court where Cade Phillips gathered it in over Walter Clayton Jr.
Phillips dished it to Bishop Boswell, but it was only out of his possession for a second. Boswell fed it back to him and Phillips finished with an empathetic dunk.
Tennessee had gone from having the lead to a full-on rout, returning the favor to a Florida team that beat it by 30 less than a month before.
"That set the whole thing off," Vols' guard Jordan Gainey said.
"I liked that play too, honestly," Mashack added.
Tennessee limped into its top 10 clash with the Gators, having lost two-straight and finding out hours before tip-off that it would be without starting point guard Zakai Zeigler, arguably its most valuable player, with a knee injury.
Then right before starting lineups were announced, forward Igor Milicic Jr., one of the few bright spots in the Vols' loss to Kentucky four days earlier, was also sidelined with illness.
Tennessee was down to just seven scholarship players, but motivation is a powerful thing and Florida provided plenty of it.
That loss to the Gators 25 days ago, when the Vols were out-rebounded, out-scored in the paint and just plane out-toughed, may have lingered a little bit more than Tennessee players had let on.
The Vols, who under Rick Barnes have lost games but very rarely because the other team bullied them, relished the upcoming rematch with a Florida team that entered Saturday as one of the top scoring teams in the league.
This time, Tennessee was the bully, out-scoring the Gators in the paint convincingly, 34-14 and holding them to season-lows in scoring and shooting percentage. Florida never established any kind of offensive rhythm.
"We knew how tough we had to play," Mashack said. "We knew what Florida did to us when we were (in Gainesville) ans we knew how we were going to have to come into this game. I think we were all excited to get to show not only Florida, but people watching how good this team could be."
Mashack was the driving force behind the performance, but Tennessee used a cast of heroes to pull off one of its most complete games this season.
Gainey took a bulk of the ball-handling duties in Zeigler's absence, going from his typical sixth-man role to being on the floor for 26 minutes. Darlinstone Dubar was effective in his first start, too.
The result was a most satisfying win for Barnes.
"I told the coaches this: win or lose, this game is going to help us because guys that I haven’t put in situations where we can really truly see what they can do," Barnes said. "Today we had to...From a coaching staff standpoint, this was a special one because of the way we were beaten down there and then came back with two starters out and played the way we did.”
Perhaps no play summed that up more than the one that Mashack kept alive.
It involved the senior leader, a role player off the bench in Phillips who had to grow up fast early in the season when J.P. Estrella was ruled out for the season with an injury, and the freshman in Boswell who had averaged three minutes per game coming in.
"It was one of those plays where OK, we're in the moment right now," Mashack said. "We came out to win this game."
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