After 31 years of finding a way to not win against Florida, Kentucky took a different route Saturday night. As the week after gets rolling and Florida’s winning streak becomes a thing of a bygone age, there are two winners who benefited most from the Wildcats 27-16 win.

One is Mark Stoops.

A year ago, Stoops was at one of the lowest ebbs in his coaching tenure. Not once but twice, Kentucky left Florida receivers completely uncovered for touchdowns in a game they lost 28-27 when a long field goal attempt came up a couple of yards short at the final horn. Sure, Kentucky had won 7 games in 2016. But the amount of grumbling and outright ranting against Stoops hit high levels the week after that game. It wasn’t the first time.

After a 2-10 season at Kentucky to begin his career, Stoops went through consecutive late-season swoons. The Wildcats started 5-1 in 2014 and lost their last six games. They began 4-1 in 2015, but again finished 5-7. That season included a loss to Vanderbilt in which Kentucky gave up a touchdown to a completely uncovered receiver and at another point managed to convert a 1st-and-goal at the 1 and a 1st-and-goal at the 2 into a combined zero points. It wasn’t pretty.

When Kentucky started the 2016 season with a surprising home loss to Southern Miss and an annual skunking from Florida (45-7), the “Fire Stoops!” rumors were hot. After a win over New Mexico State, Kentucky hosted South Carolina in a game that felt substantially like it would determine Stoops’ UK future. Kentucky trailed at halftime, but rallied late to win 17-10 behind a freshman running back in his second career start (Benny Snell), a transfer QB with a big heart, quick feet, and an inaccurate passing arm (Stephen Johnson), and an opportunistic defense.

A funny thing happened: Stoops decided that’s who his team was.

Sure, in 2016, the defense was ragged, and the offense had to put up more points. Sure, there was the bumbling 2017 loss to Florida. But Stoops decided to stay the course, and Saturday night’s game was another of the kind of wins he has made somewhat routine in Lexington. The key is that he was given the opportunity to do so.

Of course, Nick Saban is the longest tenured head coach in the SEC, but the second longest is Mark Stoops (he was hired about a week before Gus Malzahn). It would have been easy to pull the plug after the 2015 collapse, or after the struggles to open 2016, or even after the heartbreaking Florida loss of 2017. It would have been easy, but it would have been wrong.

How ironic that the final play of Kentucky’s streak busting win over Florida had Stoops — the same guy who spent the last year having his football IQ questioned, even by his own fans — waving his player into the end zone. The ball was live, he realized. Keep going. No more than a handful of people in the stadium seemed to grasp the point, but it was Stoops becoming a modern day Carlton Fisk, waving UK safety Davonte Robinson into the end zone to finish the game.

The second winner is Kentucky’s long-suffering fan base.

They’re heard all the jokes, about how if it’s not a basketball, they don’t care about it. And there are some of those. Just like there are some of those who always want the coach fired or who always want to throw 60 passes a game.

For the past 40 seasons, Kentucky football has not had a winning SEC season. Kentucky hasn’t been in the Top 25 since 2007. It hasn’t won 8 games in the regular season since 1984. Kentucky hasn’t sniffed an SEC title since a shared title in 1976, which was the team’s second ever.

It has become fashionable to complain about college football attendance. Every game is now on television, which provides more clarity and quality than ever before. Ticket prices have continued to rise, game day parking can require a second mortgage, and gasoline isn’t exactly cheap. Against that setting, Kentucky has given its fans incredibly little. Forty years of mostly irrelevant football? Yes, but Kentucky’s fans have kept coming.

Sure, Kroger Field (formerly known as Commonwealth Stadium) doesn’t always sell out. But considering the return that Kentucky football has given its fan base, they are remarkable well supported — 60,000 fans were showing up to see Stoops’s 2-10 team in 2013.

Look at the attendance records of, say, Kansas. Or Duke, even with David Cutcliffe. They can’t give tickets away. Kentucky has taken the same futility, put it in the best conference in the country, and still somehow come up with fans who came back to watch a 31st consecutive loss to the same team (62,945, actually above listed capacity for the stadium, were there for the 2017 game).

Those who kept the faith were rewarded Saturday night.

They were rewarded in much the same way as those who kept faith with a first-time head coach who is still learning in every game. The climb of Kentucky football hasn’t been glamorous or meteoric. It’s more like one of those churning Benny Snell runs, or a stop where the Kentucky defense holds the opponent to 5 yards on 3rd-and-7. But beating Florida proves that it is a climb, and that it’s still going upward.