Of course it ended that way, this game that completed the greatest regular season in the Iron Bowl of Basketball’s history. Never before have Auburn and Alabama hoops flown so close to the sun for so long in tandem. Their final regularly scheduled meeting of 2025 demanded an epic, something equally heroic and haunting, a gut-check and a gut-punch all at once.

Alabama 93, Auburn 91 delivered in every way, from a forearm to the back of the neck to a floater at the bottom of the net, as if each school’s first national championship in this once-forgotten sport were at stake.

Four weeks from tonight, it just may be.

In a game that meant nothing by conventional standards, both teams gave everything. It’s fortunate that Auburn as the 1 seed and Alabama as the 3 won’t start SEC Tournament play until Friday. It will take time to recover from this IBOB for the ages.

Has a loss ever meant less in the big picture and hurt Auburn’s heart more? The Tigers absorbed the dagger on Senior Day, no less, and the wound, while far from fatal, was somewhat self-inflicted. The SEC’s regular-season champions, powered by a veteran roster, went down in part because their talented and versatile elder statesman, Chad Baker-Mazara, lost his head and got ejected for the final, critical 15 minutes.

Has a win ever come without a banner and lifted Alabama’s soul higher? The Tide struck a pose and a nerve in its rival’s sandbox, forcing the scholars in the Jungle to throw in the towels meant for celebration, not surrender. The villainous visitors, on the final leg of a brutal closing stretch, simply needed the victory more. To their credit, they went out and took it.

These bitter foes could play bigger games before the curtain drops on this unprecedented season, already with a rivalry record 51 regular-season victories and 28 conference wins between them, but they may never play a better game than Saturday’s close encounter.

If there was a way to put the slightest damper on No. 1 Auburn’s dominant 27-win campaign, which matched the program record for the regular season, this was it. If it was possible for No. 7 Alabama to secure third place in the league with a series split and feel like a champ, mission accomplished.

It took overtime to separate them because there’s a fine line between love and hate, between Auburn Player of the Year Johni Broome draining a trey to tie with 15 seconds left in overtime and Alabama All-American Mark Sears untangling the proceedings for good with a runner in the lane.

Sears had the last words after the last points. The words he spoke into the camera: “That’s game.”

For now.

There’s precious little breathing room in the best rivalry in the sport at the moment. This season alone, they became the first SEC teams to play a 1 vs. 2 showdown, with No. 1 Auburn getting the better of No. 2 Alabama in Tuscaloosa’s pulsating, ready-for-liftoff Airplane Hangar.

Since Nate Oats arrived in T-Town to challenge Bruce Pearl for state and conference supremacy and then some, each team now has earned exactly 141 victories to lead the SEC. In their 12 head-to-head meetings, the ledger tilted 7-5 now to the Tide, each team has scored precisely 1,001 points.

Hard to believe, but no more so than imagining a decade ago that Auburn and Alabama would head into a postseason solidly on the short list of special teams good enough to reach the Final Four and cut down the final net. Their records – 27-4 and 15-3 for Auburn, 24-7 and 13-5 for Alabama – prove it, built as they were against KenPom’s two toughest schedules in America.

Put it this way. If the national champion isn’t named Auburn, Alabama, Florida, Houston or Duke, it’ll be an upset of significant proportion.

One year removed from reaching the final weekend, in the most intense environment against its most difficult opponent, Alabama showed why it’s good enough to go back and go the distance. Grant Nelson led the way on the Plains as he stacked another “Grant Nelson Game” on his legacy, playing with his mustache on fire. When he dunked on Dylan Cardwell, woofed at Auburn’s largest big man and then hit the crimson crane in Broome’s kitchen, he lit a match under the entire traveling party.

Cliff Omoruyi was a big red Doberman, eating glass and spitting dunks. Aiden Sherrell flashed his McDonald’s All-American form. Labaron Philon, per usual, displayed the guts of a burglar.

Auburn countered with fabulous freshman Tahaad Pettiford igniting the building from deep, Denver Jones locking down Sears for most of the day on an ankle not fully healed and Broome making his case as the best player in the country in the best league in memory.

The Tigers have proved their championship stuff time and time again. Their biggest challenge to stacking two more banners may come from within. Can they help Baker-Mazara’s cooler head prevail? Is it too late in the game for a crash course in anger management and impulse control?

Some of Saturday’s other gory and storied details will be lost to memory as the rivals turn their attention to bigger prizes, but this game to close this chapter of this unsurpassed season should not be forgotten. This was the Iron Bowl of Basketball at its best, with Alabama evening the score and Auburn wanting more in their greatest collective year ever.

If the basketball gods believe in justice, the Tide and Tigers will extend the drama in Nashville. Then, four weeks from tonight, they’ll settle the score forevermore at the home of the Alamo.