NASHVILLE — After a bizarre series of second-quarter plays and penalty calls left Kentucky without their leading rusher, Benny Snell, and with starting QB Stephen Johnson injured, the Wildcats — and particularly Johnson — fought back valiantly, pulling within a single point on a 9-yard touchdown run with 37 seconds to play. However, Kentucky’s attempt at a two-point conversion to take the lead fell off the fingertips of wide receiver Tavin Richardson, and Northwestern held on for a 24-23 victory that left Kentucky mourning a near-miss loss for the third time in the season.

Kentucky’s 7-6 record equals last season’s mark, and the Wildcats were left disappointed with a third loss of the season in the game’s closing seconds.

“We came up inches short and that hurts,” Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops said. “We put ourselves in position to win the football game, and sometimes you come up inches and yards off, and we did today.”

Much of the focus after the game was on Kentucky’s controversial loss of Snell, who was ejected after a personal-foul penalty early in the second quarter. The SEC’s leading rusher in the regular season had just six carries for 15 yards before the ejection, and his loss left Kentucky relying on Johnson again and again down the stretch.

After Kentucky fell behind 24-14 on a pick-six return from Northwestern’s Kyle Queiro with 7:49 to play, the game looked over. But as he has done so many times, Johnson bent but did not break. He drove Kentucky to set up a 48-yard field goal from Austin MacGinnis and then — after his defense made a 4th-down stop inside of Northwestern’s own territory — he led a touchdown drive that he capped with a 9-yard scamper inside the game’s final minute. Facing the decision of whether to play for overtime or go for the victory, Kentucky left its offense on the field.

Stoops acknowledged the difficulty of the call after the game, but said, “I’m good with it. We felt very good about the play. … If we didn’t feel like we could execute that play, we wouldn’t have done it.”

Johnson’s pass attempt on the pivotal play was on target in the end zone, but a bit high, and receiver Richardson could not haul it in.

“We were fractions off,” said Stoops.

“The ball touched my hands and I just dropped it,” Richardson said.

This was the third tough loss for Kentucky of the season, as a MacGinnis 58-yard field goal try at the horn left the Wildcats on the short end against Florida for the 31st consecutive season. Later, Ole Miss converted a winning touchdown from backup QB Jordan Ta’amu to WR A.J. Brown in the final seconds of a home game at Kroger Field. Northwestern’s cut might have been the deepest.

Looking back on the season, Stoops said that his team was “past moral victories” but at the same time acknowledged, “There were a lot of heart-breaking losses in there, but you can look at that as glass half empty/glass half full.”

Kentucky competed valiantly despite the loss of Snell, but whether the Big Blue Nation will ultimately see the 2017 season as another step in the rebuilding of their program or as a missed opportunity for a 10-3 season that was “inches short” will likely depend on Stoops’s ability to convert opportunities into victories.

For a program that hasn’t won a bowl game since 2008, the difference of inches meant plenty Friday night.