The cameras may have been rolling, but John Calipari either forgot about them or didn’t care about their presence.

In waiting for those cameras to actually roll for the live stream of UK’s first post-Christmas practice — and it was a decent wait, as the start was pushed from 5 to 5:30, and then it took an extra 10 minutes — I wondered how realistic this practice would be. It could have ranged anywhere from a bland walk-through to get the players back in gear after the holidays to a full practice.

It skewed toward the latter.

Other than having to shut down the live stream at the end as UK ran through offensive and defensive sets geared specifically toward upcoming opponents — an understandable concern — the practice was as close to a normal session as possible, except for having thousands of eyeballs watching through a computer screen.

We saw Terrence Jones practice with his finger injury (indicating he should be fine by, at the latest, Saturday). We didn’t see Kyle Wiltjer, who was sick and didn’t practice. And we saw one more example of how creative Calipari can be in what he called his Christmas gift to Big Blue Nation — insiders only, Calipari said, even though outsiders were definitely watching.

The best (and most realistic) part was hearing Calipari gradually increase the content rating of his language, capped by a spree of curse words, with a heavy emphasis particularly on s***, near the end. He berated players for the mistakes made, in one form or another, on nearly every play.

“Why doesn’t Eloy [Vargas] play more?” Calipari said during a drill. “I don’t know, watch this.”

And then we got to watch that. It’s one thing for Calipari say he yells at his players. It’s another to actually hear him yell. Many times, “behind-the-scenes” features more closely resemble “behind-the-scenes-we-are-OK-with-showing” features. This was not one of those. The filter wasn’t in place; while this led to overhearing both the good (a random guy unaware of the mic singing “My Old Kentucky Home” at the beginning) and the bad (an n-bomb dropped by someone), it was why the live stream was a success.

It wasn’t a manufactured, toned-down distortion of reality. It was a legitimate depiction of how Calipari operates in practice.

That’s a gift the fans can enjoy.

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