The story of the Florida Gators men’s basketball program becoming a nationally significant program is more than two decades long at this point, dating back to Vernon Maxwell or the first Final Four or Billy Donovan — the beginning of the rise can be put in any of many places.
It has been a wonderful journey, with peaks and valleys and championships and crap-outs. But that rise has very rarely featured triumphs over the Kentucky Wildcats — the monument to hardwood greatness the Gators have had to summit time and again — like the one that Florida scored on Saturday night.