AUBURN, Ala. — John Calipari practically danced into the postgame news conference at Neville Arena, where a capacity crowd of assembled media members waited to ask what got into his Kentucky team in a wire-to-wire win over 13th-ranked Auburn on Saturday night. The Tigers had beaten South Carolina, which was tied for first place in the SEC at the time, by 40 points here three days earlier. They’d piled up an absurd 43-2 record at home over the past three seasons. Their students had camped out in tents since Thursday, and the building was practically pulsating at tipoff. Calipari’s Wildcats, meanwhile, had recently lost three straight games at Rupp Arena for the first time in the history of the building, and their defense had been a sieve. They opened as 8 1/2-point Las Vegas underdogs Saturday.

“Boy!” Calipari crowed as he sat in front of a microphone, his favorite object. “You were hoping to see something different!”

He gloated in a mocking tone, then abruptly shifted to a harder edge.

“Please just leave my players (alone),” he said. “Let them be young and learn, and keep attacking me. I may be the worst in the country. Just attack me and leave these kids alone, OK? Thank you.”

It was an oddly defiant approach after arguably Kentucky’s biggest win and best defensive performance of the season, one in which the Cats led for 39 out of 40 minutes, by as many as 16 points, and won 70-59. But you know what? Go off, Cal. You and your guys earned the right to puff out your chests a little.

Love to see it. pic.twitter.com/bKk1wZ04Vt

— Kentucky Men’s Basketball (@KentuckyMBB) February 18, 2024

After losing at home to Gonzaga a week ago — shockingly, the fifth time this season UK scored 84-plus and lost — the defense ranked 126th nationally. After stifling Ole Miss on Tuesday night and suffocating Auburn on Saturday, the D has jumped an absurd 45 spots. The Tigers made just 30.9 percent from the field, their worst shooting performance at home in eight years. They scored 24 points below their season average and their fewest at home in two seasons. It wasn’t just the “10 percent better” defense Calipari said he was looking for. This was a dominant performance against a team with a top-10 offense.

The kind of thing worth puffing one’s chest about. Or, if you’re Auburn coach Bruce Pearl, throwing your hands up about. He quite literally did that when it was his turn to talk after the game.

“Kentucky can guard,” he said, “and they can turn it up when they want to.”

A good bit of Calipari’s bluster after the victory seemed to be about his annoyance that anyone would ever have suggested otherwise — despite two-thirds of a season’s worth of evidence to support that notion. Until this week, Kentucky could not defend. And then suddenly, it could.

“What happens,” Pearl explained, “is when kids get challenged about not playing hard and not playing physical, well, then they go out there and play hard and play physical.”

That’s what Calipari should be dancing about. Not that he has a new clap-back for his critics but that his players finally answered the bell. They finally took defending personally. They told on themselves too. This group, which has looked utterly helpless at times on that end, has now demonstrated it most certainly can stop somebody.

Antonio Reeves said Kentucky paid particular attention to being more aggressive in defending ball screens, where several teams have undressed the Cats, and it showed Saturday. Calipari has also leaned into playing sophomores Adou Thiero and Ugonna Onyenso heavily together in the frontcourt, to great effect. They rebound and defend more relentlessly than anyone on the roster. After Onyenso’s 10-block game against Ole Miss, he and Thiero combined for 21 points and 19 boards against the Tigers.

“We can do it if we really want to do it,” Onyenso said. “People said we’re bad defensively, so we came together as one. We can’t let people say things like that about us, about our defense. Coming into this game, nobody believed we were going to win this, (but) we told ourselves if we really want this, we can get it. It all depends on ourselves. The coaches can talk however long they want to, but if we don’t lock in defensively and play as one, if we don’t trust each other, we’re going nowhere.”

The obvious other side of that coin is … but what if they do lock in defensively?

Kentucky (18-7, 8-4) has done it twice in a row now and won both games, by double digits, against quality opponents after losing four of six. Loaded with scoring threats, even a decent defense makes the Wildcats a serious postseason threat. Calipari said again Saturday that his offensive firepower is the reason he has never wavered on the belief this team is built for March.

To that end, Reeves delivered one of the most important performances of his career. He has scored almost 2,200 points and produced numerous gaudy stat lines, but he has also gone cold in some of the biggest moments at Kentucky. That changed against Auburn. The Wildcats had an answer every time the Tigers made a move, and that answer was most often Reeves.

When Auburn cut the deficit to 5 late in the first half, Reeves nailed a corner 3. When the home team got it to 5 again with 12 minutes to go, Reeves sank a driving layup. When it got it to 5 again with 11 minutes to go, Reeves sank another driving layup. When it got back within 7 with nine minutes to go, Reeves sank a third consecutive driving layup. When it was time to drive in the dagger, up 9 with eight minutes to go, Reeves splashed another corner 3. He scored 13 of his 22 points in a six-minute stretch of the second half that buried the Tigers.

“When one guy can go do what he did,” Calipari said, “it’s huge. We have multiple guys that can go do stuff like that. Now the question will be, and everybody anonymously talks about our defense, but the defense knows they gotta get better. They know. They know we’ve gotta rebound balls in traffic. But the reality of it is: What did you see today? What could you write? ‘They are so bad defensively.’ That’s a top-10 offensive team.”

More of those are coming to test this new and improved Kentucky defense. First-place Alabama and its No. 1-ranked offense, which scored 100-plus for the school-record eighth time Saturday against Texas A&M, comes to Rupp Arena next weekend. A trip to second-place Tennessee, with its top-15 offense, awaits in the regular-season finale. There’s quite a bit more to prove before Calipari can take the victory lap he so badly wants.

But for a night, he and the Cats earned some swagger. Widely regarded as a soft squad for much of the year, they were so rugged and aggressive Saturday that Pearl complimented and complained about it.

“They were more physical,” Pearl said. “There were a couple of plays that I’m going to send into the league that were real physical.”

It’s about time the Cats hit somebody hard enough to be considered potentially dirty by the other side. That annoying edge is exactly what they needed to get back.

“If Kentucky guards like this,” Pearl said, “they can beat anybody.”

(Photo of Rob Dillingham getting past Auburn’s Jaylin Williams: John Reed / USA Today)