Fans felt everything during the Kick Six, and they still feel every emotion a decade later.

One team’s all-time greatest play was another’s all-time catastrophe, prompting tears of joy and sorrow — everything sports can be in both one second and thousands of lifetimes.

Up there with the top plays in sports history, let alone this rivalry or even college football, the “Kick Six” dashed Alabama’s hopes at an undefeated season and a third straight national championship, as Chris Davis returned an Adam Griffith field that goal fell short after Nick Saban lobbied to put one second back on the clock.

The ending was an earthquake. The preceding 59 minutes and 59 seconds? Ugly.

While Alabama’s stars like A.J. McCarron, T.J. Yeldon and Amari Cooper put up big stats, the offensive struggled on third down, converting on just four of 13 attempts. Auburn quarterback Nick Marshall had 97 passing yards and a pair of touchdowns, while Tre Mason ran for 164 yards. McCarron threw a 99-yard go-ahead touchdown pass to Cooper early in the fourth quarter, which looked to seal the deal for the Tide. But with just 32 seconds left, Marshall connected with Sammie Coates for a touchdown, with Cody Parkey’s extra point tying it up.

Yeldon seemed to run out of bounds as time expired, but Saban asked the refs for a review to give the Tide one more tick for Adam Griffith to attempt a 57-yard field goal. Then Chris Davis made history, handing the rivalry its most famous moment in an unbelievable 100-yard scamper, sending fans into a fever dream and onto the field — and sending the Tide back to Tuscaloosa in shock.

And the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Alabama was playing for a shot at an undefeated season and a third straight trip to the BCS Championship. Auburn gladly swooped in to dominate Missouri in the conference title game but fell short to Florida State in the national championship game.

“It’s probably one of the best endings in college football history,” War Blogle told AL.com. “I know Alabama fans wouldn’t agree with that, but if they were outside looking in, they would probably agree. It’s one of the most amazing ways to win a game of that magnitude. It’s hard to top that in terms of satisfaction of knowing how big that game was and how it was done.”

The results were, well, polarizing. Auburn fans enjoyed the moment of a lifetime. Alabama fans sunk into the fetal position, indefinitely, but not before they made their escape from Jordan-Hare, now a new kind of hell on Earth.

The dam broke, and a sea of orange and blue crashed on to the field Davis just immortalized, while the folks in crimson and white who could move their legs did so promptly into an extra cold November darkness plagued with sprinting and squealing Auburn fans whirling past on their way to cover the world in toilet paper.

“I was down there, and I got the hell out of the stadium and I avoided Toomer’s Corner like the plague and got back on the road,” said Paul T. Graham, a lifetime Alabama fan who in 2022 hosted a Twitter Spaces series called “19 Days of Misery,” wherein Crimson Tide fans came together virtually to relive and talk through the few but painful losses from the otherwise glorious Saban era. The Kick Six episode, which featured recollections from both Alabama and Auburn fans, lasted 2.5 hours.

Callie Eldredge grew up in Birmingham and later lived and worked in Auburn, sticking around in her own college town and loving it, thanks to a solid friend base. Both parents graduated from Auburn, as did her brother, before she also attended. “I was born into this,” she said. “My extended family is very split. Much like a lot of families in our state, Thanksgiving is always fun.”

She attended the game with a mutual friend of her roommate, who offered her a free ticket. They sat in the end zone where history would run right at them. “It actually really panned out well because I got to go to that game for free.”

Prior to the runback, Eldredge mainly remembers “being terrified the whole time.” A self-described “very emotional person” brought up to compete (she played sports) and obsess over Auburn football, she has progressively dreaded the Iron bowl result as the years pass. “That game, the older you get, I feel like there’s still excitement and everything around the Iron Bowl, but you almost feel relief when it’s over if you’re the team that wins,” she said. “I was just super nervous. We hoped it was going to be a good game, obviously. And it was, it was very entertaining. I was thinking I will not survive this if this goes to overtime. I just remember feeling I can’t hang on much longer. All the nerves and the heart palpitations.”

Similarly, X (formerly Twitter) user and Alabama superfan Ascot Friday (an anonymous Tide obsessive) has often said the Iron Bowl is not good for his mental health as an Alabama fan.

“As this rivalry goes, they get all the fun,” he told AL.com. “We’re miserable if we lose, we’re relieved if we win. It’s hard for me to remember being euphoric after the Iron Bowl was over. There’s one or two examples of it was a little bit better than just relief. That’s where we top out, is just being relieved the game is over and we survived it, and now we get to go on to the real goals of the season. They have a different take on the rivalry all together. It’s much more centered around that result, and we’re just trying to survive and get it over with. I never look forward to this game.”

So, when the officials put one second back on the clock and Alabama brought the field goal unit out, Eldredge’s heart nearly could not take it.

“Please no, basically” she replied when asked what she was thinking in the moment. “Whatever it takes, don’t let this happen, because I don’t want to try to survive. It felt like it had been too good of a game to end on a kick, I guess, even though that frequently happens and that’s how football works.” She remembers losing it when Nick Marshall hit Sammie Coates for a game-tying touchdown in the fourth quarter. “You’re just crossing everything, praying to God, the universe, football gods, whoever,” she said. “You want to feel like you’re helping, you want to feel like you have some form of control. Whatever I can do.”

That score remains a talking point for Tide fans, including Friday who chalks it up as just another foreboding indicator of things to come. “The one where they had multiple lineman downfield and they ran the pop-pass that should have been called back,” he recalled via Twitter Spaces. “I’m pretty sure they fumbled it to us in the first quarter. I don’t want to talk about our field goal kicking. There’s a million things about that game that led to the death blow of the Kick Six.”

Many Auburn fans remember the initial contact the same way. The kick looked good, the outlook did not.

“It was despair, immediate despair,” Eldredge sad. “I actually didn’t realize what was happening. When people started cheering, it was very confusing.”

Auburn Memes, an anonymous Tigers fans with a popular Twitter account, said in the Spaces conversation he was in block seating near the 30-yard line and also thought it would sail through the uprights. “The kick happens. They run it back. I couldn’t process it in the moment,” he said. “I’m just looking for flags, because I can’t have nice things. There’s going to be a flag. Birmingham’s not going to let this happen. Somebody stepped out. It took me the better part of probably 30 seconds before I actually let myself process what the moment was.”

As Davis rumbled down the sideline on his way to Auburn glory, opening the orange and blue floodgates to field level, no one believed what they just witnessed — least of all the home crowd.

“I remember being terrified that there was going to be some flag,” Eldredge said. “I’m holding onto my friend, death grip like you do. Everybody else is losing their minds in the stadium, and I want to be a part of that, but there’s that part of me that’s like…wait, no. In that moment, it was just so crazy. I forgot how football works. I’m sitting there like ‘Is this something we can do?’ Being afraid, there’s going to be a flag or something. This game is not over.

“But then finally, as people are pouring on to the field. Finally going OK I think we did it. I think it is over, I think it’s going to stand, and we won. So I did allow myself to emote at that point, which meant a lot of yelling. I cried. I should probably be embarrassed, but when you have that much going on, it’s going to come out in weird ways. Cheering, crying, laughing, relief. So it was all the things at once.”

Eldredge and her friend stormed the field, but not with the initial rush. “We weren’t on the side falling into hedges. It took a little bit. We did do it in a more orderly fashion, I guess being adults,” she said.

She ran into friends on the field, took photos, avoided any collisions, everyone in a state of disbelief. “It was just a blast. It was pandemonium, but it wasn’t scary or anything as far as people getting run over,” she said.

Auburn Memes described the first wave differently, having joined it and all. “We charged the field, do that whole deal. It was dangerous,” he said. “Anything that was in your hands was being thrown, so you’ve got stuff hitting you from all angles. People are pushing. Purses, hats, liquor bottles, beer cans. The subsequent week after, every student you see has scratches and bruises. Everybody had some time of injury from that moment.”

“Those Auburn Fans went nuts,” Lisa Ellis Friday, an Alabama fan who attended the game, said. “They sang ‘Go to h— Alabama’ for over an hour. Me and my houndstooth coat stood out.”

Eldredge would join the thousands who high-tailed it to Toomer’s Corner for what she could only describe as “a big party” buried in toilet paper, and not just on the famed oaks. “They were rolling everything,” she said. “It doesn’t just stay on the trees. It definitely gets to the point where it kind of looks like our version of snow.”

They stayed downtown, where screaming fans stuffed the streets, lofts lit their windows with the final score, and bars put the runback on repeat only for people to lose their minds again and again. Auburn fans have an infinite tolerance where it will never, ever get old. “It was such a moment to take in,” Auburn Memes said, noting he wanted to experience the immediate aftermath as clear-minded as he could. “This is such a pure moment in college football history and bliss, I can’t have it ruined by alcohol. I did not have a single drink of alcohol, just went home and watched SportsCenter until about 2 a.m. to see how many times they played it on replay.”

Qadeem Hassan, an Auburn fan who works at Session Bar in Tuscaloosa, was a University of Alabama student at the time who said he shared an astronomy class with Crimson Tide players Haha Clinton-Dix, Cyrus Jones, Cody Mandell and Reggie Ragland. After partying Saturday night, the returned to Tuscaloosa and couldn’t wait for class the next day. “I remember I’ve never been more excited to get to class early and sit there and wait on them,” Hassan said in the “19 Days of Misery” Space. “And I just remember getting there super early and just sitting them with that s–t grin on my face, because they had no clue that I was a fan. It was a great.”

For Alabama fans, they couldn’t watch it the first time, let alone the many various networks would roll in subsequent years.

“I’ve been forced against my will to watch that,” Ascot Friday said. “Thank you, CBS.”

Alabama superfan and Gump Twitter overlord Hunter Johnson couldn’t bear it. “I’m sitting about on the goal line, about four rows up,” he said. “When Davis cut back, I swear he was looking at me. I think he was looking at me dead in the eye. So I sat down immediately. He’s at the 30-yard line, and I did not see him cross the goal line. I knew what happened. Every time the replay would be shown, I had post-Kick-Six stress syndrome. I would just turn the TV off every time it would come on, or I would just turn away. And I didn’t watch it until we beat Auburn in 2014. I watched the replay, and I’m like, ‘OK, Hunter. We’re ready. We can watch this play now. We can do this.’ And I finally watched the play.”

He remembered the stillness of sitting in the emptying stadium. The next day, his mom asked what he and his sister did after the game. “I’m like, ‘Well I sat there for probably 30 or 40 minutes, just with my head in my hands. And my sister was like, ‘Hunter, you sat there for like a minute and you were like, ‘Let’s get the f–k out of here right now.’ It just felt like an eternity,” he said. “I get back to my car. My girlfriend at the time was with me. I hadn’t been drinking, but as we get to the car, she says, ‘Hunter, I just don’t know that you’re in an emotional state to drive right now.’ And honestly, when she said that, I was like, ‘You’re probably right.’”

Ascot Friday needed an exit and a shoulder to cry on, preferably one belonging to someone ordained. “I remember the friend I convinced to come to the game…is still bitter about it. I spent the whole game being like, ‘It’s fine. We’ll be fine. But then as we lined up to kick it, I leaned over and I was like, ‘Nothing good can happen now.’ So I was prophetic there. He runs it back. My friend leans over as he runs it back and says something profane,” he said. “We sprint out. We drive home. He’s the driver. Like Hunter, I was not ready to drive, and I called my other best friend, who happens to be a minister, and we spoke for an hour. And it was on purpose. I’ve got to talk to a man of the cloth. Unbelievable.”

Back in Tuscaloosa, the sinking feeling set in almost just as fast for those who witnessed it live. “I just started laughing. I had the break. It was my Joker moment. I just started cracking up,” former UA instructor Brian Oliu said in the Spaces conversation. “My wife crawls underneath the pool table at Egan’s and just cries. That when I knew I obviously wanted to marry this woman.”

That night, he was supposed to perform a DJ set at the former bar on the Strip, but he just couldn’t muster the strength. “I’m not doing this. I text [former owner of Egan’s] Bob Weatherly, and I’m like ‘I’m sorry, I can’t DJ.’ He calls me and he’s like, ‘If anyone wants to dance after that s–t, just kick them out of the bar.”

Emotions ran just as low across the street. “I watched it on a TV outside of The Houndstooth on the Strip,” Madison Leavelle said. “It’s the only time I’ve cried over football. I had been saving my money all season to go to the national championship game in person. I was inconsolable. I cried all the way home.”

Eldredge just feels fortunate she got to witness it in person. “I’m glad I took advantage of that. I was lucky. I didn’t previously have a ticket. I was fortunate enough to have a friend who had an extra ticket. Easiest yes ever,” she said. “I will hold on to that. It will always stay with me, I think. Glad to have pictures of it that I can share. It was a special time for sure.”

She said she also knew, at that point, she would move abroad the next spring, making her hold on a little tighter to moments like that with it being her last season living in Auburn. “I didn’t know exactly when I would get to be back,” she said. “Up until that point, I think pretty much every year of my life I’ve at least made it to a game during the season since I grew up in Birmingham and weren’t far and I had parents who taught me to love Auburn. It was very special to me. I’m a very sentimental person.”

She also went to the SEC Championship Game, when Auburn dominated Missouri on their way to the national title game in Pasadena, which she doesn’t regret, despite the Tigers’ last-minute loss. “We had a fun crew that went, and even though we ate the saddest meal at a Denny’s I think you’ll ever eat after the game, we still had a blast. It obviously didn’t take away from everything that happened that season.”

That fact is the only thing easing the pain for Alabama fans who lived through the Kick Six, simultaneously the high and low points for the opposing fan bases. “We were playing for a three-peat. Not only a three-peat, the SEC West, the SEC title overall, a potential three-peat. Who knows, possibly a Heisman for AJ McCarron if we win that game,” Johnson said. “Playing for all those things, and to have it all taken away. And not only to have it all taken away, but it’s Auburn who gets to do the things we wanted to do. They get to go play at the SEC Championship Game. They get to go to the national championship game. Not only do we get that taken away from us, we have to go watch them do it. Thank God they ended up losing.”

But still, 10 years later, the play lingers, even on unrelated road trips.

“Driving around Texas, I see a billboard for the McRib, and it says, ‘Best return ever,’ and my first thought is no it’s not. Chris Davis had the best return ever,” Johnson said. “It kind of hit me as the play happened in 2013 that that’s the greatest play in college football history, and I’m going to see that for the rest of my life, all the time. I’m never going to be able to get away from that play.”