You could see the pain on Johni Broome’s face. You could see it during the last game of his college career, and you could see it after the best team in Auburn history had come up just short of advancing to the national championship game.

The glow of that final score could burn a hole in the Auburn Family’s collective soul. Florida 79, Auburn 73. Six points. Might as well have been 16. Or 60. The pain remains the same. Or maybe it’s worse knowing a shot here and a stop there could’ve made all the difference.

Maybe the worst part is knowing you were the best team in the country for four months from November through February, spending eight straight weeks at No. 1 in the AP poll, a record for an SEC team not named Kentucky.

For more than two months, you were the best team in the best SEC in memory, maybe the best top-to-bottom conference ever, clinching the regular-season title with a full week to spare.

And then, on the season’s ultimate weekend, you had to admit something to yourself. Because there’s one game to play and it won’t include you, you were not the best team in the best Final Four ever. Because the team that ended your season plays in your league, and that same team handed you your first conference defeat, you will not go down as the best team in the best version of the SEC.

All told, including the regular season, the conference tournament and the Big Dance, you went 16-5 against SEC opponents. Florida went 18-4, 2-0 against you.

Those facts are far from failure. You were good, very good, so close to all-time great, but not quite good enough. You were close, very close, so close to winning the game your program has never won, but not quite close enough.

You had the lead, by eight points after a superb first half, by nine with 18 minutes to play, and couldn’t hold it. You had a shot, trailing by a skinny point with 2 ½ minutes left, and never regained the lead. In Broome, you had a first-team All-American, the SEC player of the year, the Sporting News national player of the year. In the end, he was outplayed – like everyone else in this NCAA Tournament – by the first first-team All-American in Florida history, Walter Clayton Jr.

In the stretch run over the final 15 minutes, Clayton looked as unbothered as ever while scoring 15 of his career-high 34 points. He joined an exclusive club as the second player in NCAA Tournament history to reach 30 points in both the Elite Eight and the national semifinals. The other: Larry Bird.

Broome, who came up huge all year while playing through a succession of physical ailments, simply looked gassed after banging heads and other body parts with four different Gator bigs. In a shocking development over those final, fateful 15 minutes, he did not score.

On the court, his discomfort was visible in intermittent winces from contact with his injured right elbow. In the postgame interview and locker rooms, the rings around his eyes, when he lifted his chin from his chest, revealed the agony inside. He had poured every bit of himself into this game and this season, this program and this team, and he simply, sadly had nothing left to give.

The man who made his mark in Auburn history like few others made no excuses for the dropoff, his or his team’s. He said he had the looks he wanted and didn’t convert them, but that’s not entirely true.

He played 16 minutes in the first half and 18 in the second half, his production decreasing in inverse proportion to his minutes. After making five of his 10 field goals and both of his free throws in the first half to lead Auburn with 12 points, he went 1 for 4 from the field and 1 of 5 from the line in the second half. Florida won the war of attrition and erosion as Todd Golden got the better of his mentor, Bruce Pearl.

Maybe Pearl could’ve spent one of his timeouts earlier to give his star a breather. Maybe he shouldn’t have shortened his postseason rotation. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered as long as Florida had Clayton and Clayton had the ball to extend one of the best individual March Madness runs in modern times.

Losing to the Gators in February, even in the Jungle, could be understood and overcome. Losing to them again in April in the Final Four could not be misconstrued.

Florida proved to be the better team. Florida demonstrated over 80 minutes of head-to-head competition that it had more of everything when it counted most. So Florida will play Houston, a team that shocked Duke with an epic comeback/collapse arc in the second semifinal, a team Auburn beat in November, for the national championship.

For some time to come, Auburn no doubt will fixate on the final defeat rather than the school-record 32 victories, on the Final Four exit rather than the Final Four achievement, on an SEC school playing for the national title but not the one that won the league’s regular-season championship.

That’s as normal and natural as the pain on Broome’s face.

But somewhere down the road, the hurt will fade for these Tigers, and it won’t matter how much pleasure their rivals have taken in their pain. No team before them in school or state history accomplished as much as they did. If you choose to focus on what Broome and his brothers didn’t do, which is a blip compared to the long list of what they got done, that says more about you.

Their season will speak for itself forever.