A cathartic win 293 days in the making: Hanging in The Grove for Lane Kiffin's return - ESPN

OXFORD, Miss. — The sun felt murderous enough that it seemed to have relocated from 93 million miles away to maybe 12. Areas of shade felt almost like a form of CPR. The peerless Ole Miss tailgate area, The Grove, throbbed with big-game bacchanal and buffets and blood-alcohol levels on Saturday, but this time with a notable art gallery popping up every now and then along the winding trail: signs depicting a certain coach, sometimes in ways that showed just how far we've come sometimes in saying, Aw, the hell with the genteel. Impasses formed in the alleyways. It all felt like bedlam plus frenzy even as veteran revelers called it tamer than anticipated.

The end of time did not come.

It never seems to despite frequent forecasts, but the 293rd sunrise since Nov. 30, 2025, in Oxford seemed to heave with Armageddon elements even during a calm morning, when a plane did hum overhead while pulling a sign reading, DADDY'S HOME GEAUX TIGERS. LSU's visit to Ole Miss involved three giant crockpots of melodrama — college football, the Southeastern Conference, Ole Miss vs. LSU — and then tacked on the Coachella of all coaching relocations, Lane Kiffin's move from Ole Miss and the doorstep of the College Football Playoff to LSU on that last Sunday of last November, when the LSU plane and the Ole Miss middle fingers outside the fences ascended.

Right from there, Nov. 19 sat way down the calendar looking like a primo festival of contempt in college football's grand tradition of contempt. Hard feelings bubbled here for the months since, then the art expressed it come Saturday at last. Some of that art had lengthy roots.

One poster went way back to the Arizona night of last Jan. 9, when six or seven Ole Miss devotees left the Fiesta Bowl,