A few days before Halloween 2018, it’s worth wondering if Kentucky has done what seemed unthinkable — kill the curse on the football program.

The curse, for the uninitiated, is generally presumed to have followed the one glorious era in modern Kentucky football history — the 1946-53 administration of coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who led Kentucky to a 60-23-5 mark in his seasons in Lexington, including an SEC title in 1950 and a Sugar Bowl win over Oklahoma on New Year’s Day 1951.

The most popular version of the story, fueled by Bryant himself, was that shortly before the Sugar Bowl, the university held a banquet. Hoops coach Adolph Rupp, fresh off his third NCAA title, was honored with a new car. Bryant was honored with a cigarette lighter. It’s a great story, and it neatly captures the dilemma of hoops-mad UK being focused on basketball at the expense of football. Bryant even went on Rupp’s TV show late in life to tell the story.

The problem is that the story isn’t true … and, maybe, neither is Kentucky’s lack of commitment to football.

In fact, Bryant was given a new car by the governor of Kentucky shortly before he departed Lexington, in an event in which the governor expressed his hopes of keeping Bryant around. No record of Rupp’s car or Bryant’s cigarette lighter survives, except as accounts of Bryant telling the story as a joke in speeches around Kentucky. Eventually, the joke became true in Bryant’s mind. And the myth that Kentucky didn’t care about football similarly took root.

Sure, Kentucky football history has been woebegone. They hired Charlie Bradshaw, who actually led the 1965 team to a bowl berth but then declined to accept a lower-tier bowl, thinking his 6-2 Wildcats would play their way to a bigger game. Instead, quarterback Rick Norton blew out his knee at the Astrodome in Houston, and UK missed another win or a bowl. They hired Bill Curry, and they lost a game in which they intercepted seven Florida passes (24-20 in 1993). They went on probation, hired Guy Morriss and lost to LSU in a game that still renders me speechless (2002 Bluegrass Miracle; if you don’t know, Google it). They hired Joker Phillips, a kind and decent enough man who inherited a decent roster and promptly turned it into a team that would have struggled to compete in a decent FCS conference.

In between utter failures, Kentucky stumbled onto a few solid coaches who built decent teams but lacked the glamour or the long-term standing to move Kentucky into a higher spot in the college football pecking order (Blanton Collier, Jerry Claiborne, Rich Brooks).

Mark Stoops’ sixth season has moved him into the top five most winning coaches in UK football history. Kentucky committed to bigger, nicer facilities. They spent money on assistant coaches who knew the SEC ropes and recruited an interesting mix of under-the-radar types (Benny Snell), long-shot sleepers who came through (Josh Allen) and home state kids who would bleed blue and white (Kash Daniel).

And eventually, gradually, the tradition of giving away games in the last seconds, of losing heartbreaking battles, has started to turn. In 2016, when kicker Austin MacGinnis hit a buzzer-beating field goal to come from behind and beat Mississippi State 40-38, the search went out for when was the last time Kentucky had made such a kick. The answer was never.

Credit: Mark Zerof-USA TODAY Sports

Saturday presented another situation in which most teams would have come away with defeat. Several times late in the fourth quarter, ESPN’s statistical indicator rated Missouri with a greater than 95 percent chance of victory. But a Kentucky team that had not scored an offensive touchdown, or shown much of a passing game, drove the ball 81 yards in 84 seconds, using an extra untimed play on a 2-yard game-winning pass from Terry Wilson to C.J. Conrad.

Kentucky found a way to win, and they’ve done a fair share of that in the last three seasons.

For the literalists among us, those who don’t believe that Bryant cursed his former employer or that Kentucky built their stadium on Native American burial ground or that a crossroads deal with the devil for the hoops program made this happen, there is another explanation.

Maybe — just maybe — there never was a curse. Maybe what was called a curse was just the phenomenon that the team that does a million smart, almost unnoticeable things tends to find a way to win. Maybe Kentucky built a football team in the image of those great early ‘50s teams — punishing defense, grinding rushing attack, defensive-minded head coach coming into his own.

And if that’s the case, then Stoops and the Wildcats might just prove on Saturday that not only is the curse around Kentucky football dead and gone, but that it has been replaced by a new tradition. If they do, the odds are pretty good that the noise from Lexington might be loud enough to reach Bear Bryant wherever it is that old football coaches end up. Maybe he still has that infamous cigarette lighter ready to fire up a victory stogie.