By LARRY VAUGHT

It wasn’t exactly the way anyone wearing blue envisioned this game turning out, but Kentucky coach Rich Brooks knew better than to complain.

“A win is a win is a win,” said Brooks after UK overcame three second-half turnovers and a first-half clock management blunder to beat rival Louisville 31-27 here Saturday.

Still, maybe the Kentucky program has got to the point where there is a bad win. The Cats were a double-digit favorite playing at home. They got off to a 17-7 lead in the first half against a Louisville team that is probably fighting to save coach Steve Kragthorpe’s job this season.

If UK is going to be good enough to play with Southeastern Conference powers — and it does host No. 1 Florida next — and go to a fourth straight bowl game, then should Kentucky have needed a comeback and key Louisville miscues to beat what is thought to be a mediocre team.

“A win is a win always,” Randall Cobb, who caught the winning touchdown pass with 4 minutes, 28 seconds to play. “As long as you get the win, that’s all you need. With close games, you just want to make sure you find how to win.”

But even Cobb wasn’t sure the Cats were going to get that chance until Trent Guy fumbled a punt and UK’s A.J. Nance recovered at the 24-yard line.

“It was pretty desolate on our sideline until then. But once we got that chance, we knew we could win,” Cobb said.

True. And Kentucky did win, something the Cats seldom seemed to do in close games until the second half of the 2006 season.

Yet even Brooks admitted underdog Louisville made it painful for his Cats.

“They took the fight to us,” the UK coach said. “Our defense was not as sharp as it should have been. They did a good job throwing the ball. We gave up long balls. We were overpursuing at times.”

Kentucky also squandered a scoring chance late in the first half with horrible clock management along with a decision by Mike Hartline not to throw a pass either out of bounds or into the end zone as he was instructed.

“That’s on me. I should have made sure that didn’t happen,” Brooks said.

Then in the third quarter Derrick Locke, who had a 100-yard kickoff return and 310 all-purpose yards, fumbled a kickoff struggling for extra yards, Hartline was intercepted forcing a short pass to Cobb and Hartline fumbled. That meant UK ran four plays and gained 13 yards to Louisville’s 141 yards and 24 plays in the quarter.

Plus, UK gave up a 66-yard scoring pass in the fourth quarter two plays after it had fought back to take a 24-20 lead.

“But we did win,” defensive tackle Ricky Lumpkin said. “Don’t forget that. We may have played pretty bad at times, and we know we have a lot of things to fix, but we did win. This program is not to the point where we are not going to be excited about a win. There might be a win you are not quite as happy with, but there are no bad wins for us.”

Perhaps linebacker Sam  Maxwell had that very thought when he picked off Louisville quarterback Justin Burke’s pass at the UK 21-yard line with less than two minutes remaining. Or maybe linebacker Micah Johnson and others were thinking the same thing when they batted down Burke’s final pass inside the 10-yard line to end the game.

“Now we expect to win. No matter what happens, we still think we are going to win,” Maxwell said.

That belief might be all that carried the Wildcats to their third straight win over the Cardinals, too.

“Our team has learned we are a good team capable of making up for mistakes or another team’s good plays,” Brooks said. “We didn’t hang our heads when we got behind.

“Four or five years ago if some of these things happened to us, we would have lost the game. But our team knows we have playmakers and can overcome mistakes. I like the way we responded to the pressure in the fourth quarter. We had to make plays and we did.”

Kentucky will have to make a lot more plays the next four weeks to have any chance to beat Florida, Alabama, South Carolina or Auburn. It will have to fix defensive leaks that allowed the Cardinals to average 5.5 yards per play.

“We have to learn to finish a team if we have a chance,” Joker Phillips, UK’s head coach of the offense, said. “We have to make sure we keep improving.”

Hartline was 20-for-28 passing for 178 yards as most of his throws were short, relatively safe routes.

UK did rush for 168 yards and average 5.1 yards per try. The offense did score two touchdowns in the fourth quarter.

But Brooks still knew his team was probably lucky to win.

“It was a wild, exciting game and thank God we won,” he said.

After all, there still aren’t any bad wins at UK yet.

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