Everything in the postgame locker room had the mark of a season-ending loss to it. Brandon Knight and Terrence Jones both sat with their heads in their hands once interviews were over. DeAndre Liggins stared blankly at his name tag for his soon-to-be-empty locker. Josh Harrellson stood in the corner, still with tears in his eyes, choking up when he talked about his teammates or his time at UK.

“Nothing hurts like this,” said Harrellson after UK’s Final Four 56-55 Final four loss to Connecticut. “My last time putting on a Kentucky uniform. It’s harsh and it hurts. But I never dreamed of being in this position, so I’m happy.”

The dream for a national championship had ended, and Liggins was still dealing with missing the last-second shot that could have won the game. He second-guessed it, saying he should have drove. He paused mid-sentence during his explanation, gathering his thoughts. Everyone, including himself, said it was a good, clean shot. But he still looked like he was carrying the weight of that miss, and the loss, through the locker room.

“It’s going to be tough to swallow for a couple days,” Liggins said. “We had so many doubters,” Liggins said. “If we could have won this, oh man. It would have been a dream come true.”

Getting to the Final Four was an enchanted run by itself. Nobody expected it. Not the experts, who wrote UK off midseason, and sometimes not even their own fans, as Josh Harrellson recalled.

“Even our own fans doubted me and doubted our team, looking on to next year,” Harrellson said.

UK rode the “nobody believes in us” mentality to wins over Ohio State and North Carolina. Even when they were favored by Las Vegas and by many experts, John Calipari still tried to maintain it by saying everybody was picking against UK.

That thought process, of going up against the world, fueled UK.

“It was a great year,” Terrence Jones said, who was visibly shaking during interviews. “All the people that didn’t believe we couldn’t make it this far, always picking us to lose every game this whole tournament, just going out and proving them wrong together.”

Together – that’s what was special about this team. It was a daily grind, to unify, to believe in themselves, to work for the team even as Calipari preached that it was a players-first program.

“Everyone really wanted to come together and do something special, and I appreciate that,” Brandon Knight said.

At the beginning of the season, UK was disjointed and individualized, perhaps none more so than “selfish m*****f*****” Terrence Jones, as he was called by Calipari during SEC play. But that improvement was what made Jones so proud.

“A lot of guys pushed ourselves to be better teammates, be better on the floor,” Jones said. “A lot of guys made sacrifices to better the team. These are my brothers.”

Jones among them. After shooting to the top of the National Player of the Year debate early, he started ceding some of his shots to make the team more balanced. Harrellson practiced extra every day, an attempt to maximize his last year at UK. Brandon Knight got out of his comfort zone, becoming a vocal, team-first point guard. Liggins, an admitted loner last year, wanted to “be around us more, and care,” Jones said.

The finality of the loss was tough for the players, knowing it was the last time that specific group of players would be together, and that they fell just short of reaching their goal after accomplishing so much.

The players — the brothers — felt the worst for Harrellson after the game. The lone senior had finally met the game that was his last in a UK uniform.

“But I’m not going to wash my uniform,” Harrellson said. “It’s going to hang up like this. Final Four logo on it and everything.”