Kentucky Wildcats fans began Saturday night by booing John Calipari. They ended it booing Mark Pope and his players.

On a stunning night in Lexington, Ky., the Arkansas Razorbacks played their best game of what had been a hugely disappointing season, transforming Calipari’s return to Rupp Arena into an 89–79 upset victory of the No. 12 Wildcats. Cal spent the last several years frustrating Kentucky fans as their coach; now he’s frustrated them as an opponent. Swaggy Cal came back from the grave.

With more than three minutes remaining and the outcome no longer in doubt, UK fans started sprinting for the exits as if fire alarms had just sounded. They didn’t want to be around to see Cal revel in this moment. Big Blue Nation had been winning the breakup with its ex-coach for the first three months of the season, but Saturday night changes the equation.

Among the fans who stayed for the final minutes, sporadic boos rang out. Not with the vicious volume of Ohio State Buckeyes fans haranguing their football team after the loss to the Michigan Wolverines, but the boos were audible.

This was a bad outcome for Big Blue Nation. Very bad. And a delicious one for Calipari, who showed that it’s still dangerous to count him out, even a decade past his prime.

“It’s hard to win in here,” Calipari said. “I looked up a couple times [at the scoreboard] and I thought we were losing because I kept looking at Kentucky instead of Arkansas. … It was 15 years here.”

Fifteen years—many of them great, but not recently. The one and only national championship was in 2012 and the last Final Four was in ’15, even though the NBA draft picks kept rolling through the program. It was Cal’s declining returns that forced him to flee the best job he’d ever had, relocating almost his entire operation (players and staff) to Fayetteville, Ark., in tacit admission that he could no longer get it done at Kentucky.

The early returns at Arkansas had been lousy—a 12–8 start that included a 1–6 record in the Southeastern Conference. The Hogs came to Rupp well outside NCAA tournament consideration. They leave it significantly closer, but they still need to stack a lot of wins to get into the bracket.

For Pope and his overachieving team, the honeymoon might have ended abruptly Saturday night. The captain of the 1996 Kentucky national champions memorably said at his introduction last spring, “I understand the assignment.” And a key part of the assignment this season was winning this game.

“There’s a lot going on in that game,” said ESPN analyst Jimmy Dykes earlier in the week. “Is there pressure on Mark Pope to win that game? Yeah, there probably is.”

All the good feelings that came with beating Duke, Gonzaga, Tennessee, Florida and Louisville just ran headlong into an embarrassing defeat in a game the fan base all but demanded to win. At 15–6 overall, 4–4 in the murderous SEC, Kentucky has injury issues, rotation questions, defensive lapses—and perhaps a newfound lapse of faith in its first-year head coach.

“It’s a journey for us,” Pope cautioned afterward. “It’s not a coronation.”