LEXINGTON, Ky. — For two and a half home games, the Kentucky Wildcats were the gang that couldn't shoot straight from the 3-point line. When sophomore point guard Ashton Hagans dropped a long ball from the right wing just inside a minute remaining in the first half Saturday night, it was the Wildcats' fourth 3 in 36 attempts over their last three games at Rupp Arena. That's 8.3 percent.

Things Quickley changed in the second half. 

As in Immanuel Quickley, the blossoming sophomore bucket-getter who put on a 2-minute, 15-second shooting clinic that turned the fortunes for the 12th-ranked Cats, turned up the noise at sold-out Rupp, and eventually turned out a 65-59 victory for the home team. Quickley, the 6-foot-3, 188-pound guard and former McDonald's All-American, splashed the Gators for a career-high 26 points, 22 of which came in the second half, including a blitz of back-to-back-to-back 3-balls that broke open a tight game and almost blew Rupp's roof into the Big Blue Nation sky. Freshman guard Tyrese Maxey had 13 points, seven rebounds and seven assists to help Kentucky (22-5, 12-2) win a sixth straight and maintain a two-game cushion on first place in the Southeastern Conference standings.

"He was fantastic," UF coach Mike White said Quickley. "He was the best player on the floor. I thought he did a great job of finding spacing, searching, and they did a good job of finding him. He hit huge shots and complimented that with terrific defense on the perimeter." 

Quickley teamed with Maxey and Hagans to help hold the Gators (17-10, 9-5) to 40.7 shooting in the second half, force 16 turnovers and smother the perimeter punch of UF's Andrew Nembhard, Noah Locke and Scottie Lewis in limiting that starting trio to just six points, including the first scoreless game from Locke (the SEC's top 3-point shooter at 52.6 percent) in more than a year. Locke came into the game having made at least one 3-pointer in 24 consecutive games— the eighth-longest streak in school history — but finished 0-for-5 from the floor, with all five attempts from deep. 

UF, though, managed to make things interesting in the final minute-plus by trimming an eight-point lead to two, at 61-59, with 19 seconds left by forcing three UK turnovers. The Gators, though, couldn't get a last-ditch stop, with Maxey and Quickley sealing the deal with free throws.  
 
The Gators, who fell from a three-way tie for second place in the SEC to alone in fourth place, were led by sophomore forward Keyontae Johnson's 19 points and nine rebounds, plus 18 points and five rebounds from grad-transfer forward Kerry Blackshear Jr., who also had five of his team's 16 turnovers. Backup guard Tre Mann came off the bench to equal his career high of 13 points on 3-for-4 from long distance.

"There was a lot of fight, but a lot of mistakes, especially from me," Blackshear said. "But we put ourselves in position to have a chance at the end."

They would have had a better chance had Quickley not come alive. Give credit to UK coach John Calipari and his staff for giving Quickley grief for too much dribbling and not enough shooting.

"I don't want to say who it was, but one of the coaches yelled at me with some pretty choice words," Quickley said. "For lack of a better term, he said, 'You need to score.' So, that kind of got me.I didn't think I was dribbling to pass, I thought I was just making plays. But it happens sometimes, coaches see one thing and a player sees another."

Soon, everyone saw the long balls dropping. And quickly, as it were.

Florida led 44-41 when Quickley's bomb spree began at the 13:25 mark and tied the game. He hit the next at 11:48 and the one after that at 11:17. The first two came from opposite corners and the last was a transition dagger from the top of the key and put the Cats up by six, forcing the Gators to take a timeout amid the din. 

"We were digging in too hard [inside] and losing sight of our man," Johnson said. "We knew he could shoot the ball real good, but we weren't supposed to dig in that hard. We were just too worried about the post and he was searching for the open area and got wide open shots." 
 
The margin was eight with just over eight minutes remaining before UF halted a drought of six minutes without a field goal, courtesy of a 3-pointer by Mann, which helped settle the Gators after the bombastic "Rupp Run."

Quickley's fourth 3 came with 1:31 to go and bounced up and through as the shot clock buzzed and put the Wildcats up 61-53. That's when UF's flurry of steals and Kentucky's shaky handling of the pressure defense, with Lewis especially aggressive on the ball, nearly had the Gators on the brink of another astounding comeback. Twice UF came within a millisecond of turning over the Cats one more time, but officials bailed them out both times; the first by calling a foul, the second by giving them a timeout that the UF bench protested should have been a five-second inbound violation.

"It's a pretty resilient group," White said. "We've had a couple pretty huge come-from-behind victories, which is a negative and positive at the same time. I just saw the same thing from us; continued to fight. We just dug too much of a hole there, led by Quickley's three consecutive 3s." 

UF did a pretty decent job in dealing with UK's size in winning the battle of the boards 30-27, and keeping 6-10, 249-pound forward Nick Richards at bay with nine points and six rebounds over 30 minutes. The Cats, though, scored 36 points in the paint and had 10 fast-break points to none for the Gators. 

But the biggest difference? Kentucky went 4-for-11 from distance in the second half versus Florida's 1-for-9. 

And those nine makes matched the Cats' number of made 3s over the previous 100 minutes. They added up. Quickley. 

"We understood coming into the game that he was an X-factor for them," Blackshear said. "They found him, trusted him and he made the plays."