After a night to sleep on it, South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier remained quite thrilled with Saturday's 35-21 victory over top-ranked Alabama.
Was South Carolina's first victory over a No. 1 team also Spurrier's greatest regular-season triumph?
"I don't know," Spurrier said Sunday. "If it turns out as good as when Duke beat Clemson in 1989 - gosh, that was only 21 years ago, wasn't it? That was a big win because we won all the conference games after that. If we can go on from here and make something happen, then maybe we can look back on it and say it was a big regular-season win also.
"A lot of the Gamecocks who have been here the last 20, 30 or 40 years referred to it as the biggest win in the stadium here."
Stephen Garcia completed 17 of 20 passes for 201 yards, with 127 of those going to 6-foot-4, 237-pound matchup nightmare Alshon Jeffery, while freshman tailback Marcus Lattimore pounded out 93 yards on 23 carries. The Gamecocks became the first team to hang five touchdowns on Alabama since LSU in 2007 and held the Crimson Tide to just two touchdowns.
"Everybody has a lot to learn from this experience," Tide coach Nick Saban said.
South Carolina joined Vanderbilt, which defeated Ole Miss on Sept. 18, as the only SEC East teams to knock off an SEC West counterpart in 11 such meetings this season. The Gamecocks lead the East with a 2-1 league mark, while the 1-1 Commodores are the only other team in the division with fewer than two losses.
"The East appears to be a little bit down in relation to the West right now," Spurrier said. "If there is a year for us to win the East - we've got road games the next two weeks at Kentucky and at Vandy, and Vandy beat us there a couple of years ago."
South Carolina's win ended the SEC's run of 29 straight weeks with a team ranked No. 1, and it gave Spurrier his 107th career league victory. That moved him past former Ole Miss coach Johnny Vaught and into second place behind former Kentucky and Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, who won 159.
Spurrier, who repeatedly said "let's give fate a chance" leading up to the Alabama game, has kept 10 game balls in his office in Columbia. Nine are from the various championships he won at Florida, and the 10th is from the '89 Duke-Clemson game, which propelled the Blue Devils to a share of the ACC title.
When a player suggested to Spurrier and the team that one of Saturday's game balls be dedicated to fate, Spurrier accepted on fate's behalf. Will it become No. 11 in his office?
"We've got to see where it leads us," he said. "That's the key right there."