OXFORD, Miss. — The football gods, who have been quiet for about ten months, believed in karma for one Saturday night. Ole Miss won the breakup 32–24, and Lane Kiffin, making his first trip back to Oxford as LSU’s head coach, left the way a person leaves a place that has decided, on the record, what it thinks of him.

The crowd was, by every account that followed, a thing of its own. The stadium was full an hour before kickoff, and the noise was loud enough, Kiffin himself admitted, to make his team commit a series of pre-snap penalties, the most significant a false start on second and goal. That is the sound a stadium makes when it has been waiting ten months to say a word it has had drafted since November. CBS Sports described it as the football gods believing, for one night, that karma was real. That is a description of a sport, and also of a relationship, and the two, it turns out, are the same event.

"The crowd was not a crowd. The crowd was a statement, and the statement was 32–24, and the statement was delivered, as statements are, before the final whistle and long after the final appeal."

Kiffin, after the loss, was characteristically precise about what he was experiencing. He said he was “emotional.” He said he was relieved the return was over. He said there was “a lot of emotions of gratefulness for this place beyond football.” And then, in the post-game exchange that became the night’s second story, he took what one outlet could only describe as a “subtle shot” at the fans, joking that he might have been the reason the stadium was full. CNN summed up the weekend as a “raucous” one that ended with Ole Miss getting “sweet revenge.” That is the sports-desk word for a relationship that has, in the space of one Saturday, been both ended and, in the only way that counts in college football, settled.

THE RETURN, BY THE NUMBERS

  • Months since Kiffin left Oxford: roughly ten
  • Final score: Ole Miss 32, LSU 24
  • Stadium full before kickoff: one hour
  • Costly pre-snap penalties attributed to the noise: several
  • Most significant penalty: a false start, on second and goal
  • Kiffin's post-game state: "emotional"
  • Kiffin's post-game plan: to leave

The players, on camera, had their own final act. One account caught it, the moment the Rebels’ last play of the night became, in the language of the build, “brutal revenge.” That is what a homecoming is, when the home is the stadium and the coming is the thing you left behind. It is not a game. It is a reception, and the reception, this time, was 32–24, and it was, in the words of the people who planned it, worth it.

At press time, Kiffin was, by his own account, past it, and the stadium was, by every account, past it in the other direction, and the false start on second and goal had been reviewed enough times to become, in the town, a kind of local heritage.