The fall from grace is swift and unforeseen.
The UF soccer team's most recent 3-2 double overtime loss to Mississippi on Sunday ushered in the possibility of a new mindset in the Southeastern Conference: the Gators are vulnerable.
UF coach Becky Burleigh and her players all echoed the same thing, it's up to them to change other people's perception.
"Our players come here to win the SEC and we're certainly not giving up that fight," Burleigh said. "We have too much talent on this team for this thing to not turn around."
By tying Mississippi State last Friday, 1-1, UF broke its 22-game SEC regular-season win streak that started Oct. 7, 2007.
Sophomore Lindsay Thompson said it was two different teams from the state of Mississippi than the ones the Gators (8-4-1, 2-1-1 SEC) beat last year en route to an 11-0 conference record.
"I feel like we have to bounce back and do what we can this weekend to prove that we're still somebody who is going to be reckoned with in the SEC," Thompson said.
For a program that has finished first in the SEC the last three years, a tie and loss in consecutive SEC matches is something other conference foes can feed upon.
"I think teams have probably gotten a little arrogant because the team that went undefeated last year kind of stumbled this past week," senior Angela Napolitano said.
While the loss is a blemish on the record, players tried to take it as a lesson.
"I think that it's good in the sense that it humbles us," Napolitano said. "It reminds us that if we don't come out the way we need to, that we can get beat by anybody."
Redshirt freshman McKenzie Barney, whose first two college goals came against Vanderbilt, said it reinforced the constant focus the team needs to have.
"Nothing worth having is going to come easy at all this season," she said. "We can't let down for one game, we can't let down for one second."
Barney said it doesn't matter how other teams in the conference perceive the Gators, and that it shouldn't affect the way the team executes. She said part of the plan is making sure UF dictates the tempo and plays its fast-paced offense.
"Personally I always think - well I know - that we're a good team," Barney said.
If anything, the team will hope that history repeats itself. The 22-game SEC regular-season win streak began after back-to-back losses at Georgia and at Tennessee.
If the team has fallen in the SEC totem pole, the climb back up will partly rest on the upperclassmen's experience.
"We've been here before," Napolitano said. "We've come back and it's not anything that's out of our reach by any means."
