There was no pair of red high-heeled shoes tossed onto the floor of Tad Smith Coliseum on Saturday. There were no whizzing vodka bottles raining down from a sparsely populated Ole Miss student section.

Saturday’s basketball game between Alabama and Ole Miss ended in a fashion that was just as weird, in its own way, as the Alabama-Ole Miss football game’s conclusion five months earlier.

The parallels are obvious: one team appears to be dead with two minutes left to play, then makes a miraculous comeback, only to have the game end on a hard-to-understand replay review.

But no one is going to go bananas this time. Alabama officials are not going to call a press conference and whine about an SEC conspiracy. Alabama fans aren’t going to analyze the video evidence of the final five seconds as though they were dissecting the Zapruder film.

There are a lot of reasons for that. First, it was the visiting team that didn’t get the benefit of the doubt this time. Yes, even the correct call would hardly have guaranteed an Alabama win.

It would merely have sent Ole Miss to the foul line with a shade over four seconds to play. (Of course, a different call on Seth Adams’ non-catch in the football game wouldn’t have put any points on the board, either, although you rarely saw that mentioned.) Second, it’s basketball, not football, which is a terrible thing to say but, sadly, is true at both institutions, as far as the fan bases are concerned.

Third, Mark Gottfried is not Ragin’ Ed Orgeron. Gottfried was clearly unhappy when his team was told “Game Over” with 2.5 seconds still showing on the Tad Smith Coliseum clock.

He expressed a good bit of disappointment about the way the game ended, but did not question that Ole Miss had won the game fair and square, largely because the Crimson Tide defended poorly for much of the second half.

Fourth, the outcome isn’t going to change much. That doesn’t mean that winning is not important. It is important. But we are still talking about settling fourth or fifth place in the SEC Western Division.

Furthermore, it could be argued that the Alabama loss cost Orgeron his job (although it was probably the season-ending loss to Mississippi State that sealed the fate of the Rebel football coach.) Will Saturday’s loss have a similar effect on Gottfried? Probably not.

As usual, teams are what they are, and Saturday’s road loss spoke volumes about the Crimson Tide season. There were chances in the first half for Alabama to build a decent-sized lead.

Part of the reason that didn’t happen was the discrepancy in foul shots. (Gottfried was far hotter about some first-half calls than he was about the bizarre end game, and seemed at one point to be begging for a technical foul which never was whistled.) But part of the reason was that Alabama let opportunities slip away. Then, in the second half, the defense was bad.

When a team shoots 75 percent from the floor, which Ole Miss did, there is no other explanation. The Rebels executed well, with Chris Warren and David Huertas making 3-point shots and Kenny Williams and Dwayne Curtis wearing the Tide out on the inside. But some of the problem was simply that Alabama didn’t defend very well.

It’s worth noting, at least as an aside, that there was one brief stretch in the first half when Alabama did defend pretty well, at least in terms of creating turnovers. That was those frenetic final two minutes, when circumstances mandated that UA use full-court pressure. Who knows what would have happened if Alabama had done that all afternoon, or all year? There is no way to know, but it seems worth a mention.

This year’s Crimson Tide team does, at least, have a fighting spirit that wasn’t always evident last year. That’s why Saturday’s game was a three-point loss and not a 23-point loss, which it almost certainly would have been a year ago. But it also hasn’t found a way to win on the road, and seems very likely to have the worst SEC record posted in Tuscaloosa in nearly four decades.

Saturday’s loss ended in a weird and frustrating way. But it wasn’t any more frustrating than the rest of the season has been, for different reasons.

Cecil Hurt is sports editor of the Tuscaloosa News. Reach him at cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0225.