For all the good feelings surrounding one of the best starts in school history, one word seemed to elude the Kentucky women’s basketball team:Respect. Twenty-point dustings, one of the nation’s top ranked defenses and an All-American candidate in Victoria Dunlap (yes, she is playing like one) weren’t enough to squash a (ridiculous and quite laughable) preseason prediction that tabbed the Cats the second-worst team in the Southeastern Conference.Sunday’s pivotal 63-53 win over No. 17 Vanderbilt – the Cats’ first victory over the Commodores since 1999 – should put to rest any doubts about the legitimacy of Kentucky’s 13-2 start to the season. “I think they have a lot more talent than they had last year,” Vanderbilt head coach Melanie Balcomb said. “Matthew (Mitchell) is doing a great job with them defensively and they have more offensive weapons. I have no idea why they were picked 11th.”Whoever did certainly won’t want to fess up to it now. Much like the football coaches at SEC football media days when they were questioned for not voting all-world Tim Tebow to the All-SEC first team, Balcomb quickly pointed out that she wasn’t one of the coaches that tabbed UK 11th in the preseason.Even if she did, nobody wants to look that foolish with how the Cats are playing this season. Thursday’s near upset of No. 8 Georgia and Sunday’s streak-stopping win over nationally ranked Vanderbilt confirms what the non-conference slate led us to believe. This is a very good basketball team under third-year coach Matthew Mitchell, a defensively, up-tempo style team designed to compete with the powerhouses of the rugged SEC.”There may be this notion out here that we haven’t been a tested team and we don’t know what’s going on with the team, but I know what we have,” Mitchell said. He knows he has a team on the verge of contending, one filled with players that needed just a little more proof as to how close they are, regardless of what the pollsters and national media thinks.”This was a very, very important game,” Mitchell said. “If you lose this game, it’s harder to get back in there and sell to (the players) that defense is where it is. As hard as we play and as difficult as the league is, you need to see some success.”The entire team should be reassured after Sunday’s win because defense is what put the brakes on a decade-long streak. Defense is what gave them their first win over a ranked opponent in nearly a year and defense is what should – if they pollsters place any value in their ballots – put the Cats back in the top 25 next week for the first time since the 2006-07 season.Junior guard Amber Smith, who scored a team-high 20 points and put UK on her back at times in the second half, believes it’s the type of signature win that could finally turn attention back to the Wildcat program.”I think it is,” Smith said. “We can’t worry about the media. We’re just going to keep playing hard and we’re going to keep winning games. They’re going to have to respect us. We’re going to force them to because we’re going to play hard every night.”It was also important for the Cats to keep their confidence intact. An 11-0 start to the season followed two conference losses and three in the last four games might have fractured their psyche.But the second half of Sunday’s game painted a pretty clear picture that the Cats’ mentality isn’t easily broken.”If we would have lost this one I still think we would have bounced back because I know the demeanor of this team, I know the players on this team and I know we could, but we didn’t want to lose,” Smith said. “That’s basically it. We refused to lose. We wanted to win. We wanted to go 1-1 (in the SEC) and continue to win.”Smith, who Mitchell called the team’s emotional leader, was the main reason behind the come-from-behind win.When everything was going Vanderbilt’s way, Smith was at her best. Mired in a shooting slump as cold as the wintry snow outside – the Cats shot just 21.9 percent in the first half and dipped as low as 17 percent in the second half – down by 10 points early in the second half and without sophomore guard Rebecca Gray (stomach virus) for the second game, Smith took over.With UK trailing 41-31 at the 12:29 mark, Smith scored nine of UK’s next 16 points in a 16-5 run that gave the Wildcats a 47-46 advantage. The Cats never trailed again, going on a 32-12 run to close the game. Smith scored 13 of her 15 second-half points after UK trailed by 10, but she credited the turnaround to the Cats’ unwavering ability to defend.”We turned it around on defense,” said Smith, whose team forced a Vanderbilt season-high 26 turnovers. “We got turnovers that we converted into points. We just went back to our bread and butter and that’s defense. We turned it up on that end with a lot of intensity. Once we got that going, shots started falling.””(Defense) got us this far, so why go away from it?” Smith said.The players are buying in, the coach believes it and the fans are full onboard. When will the SEC and the rest of the nation get it?”I think that it is particularly important for me today to put the credit exactly where it should go and that is to the players,” Mitchell said. “We did not call a lot of different plays and didn’t make any adjustments. The players just kept battling. They changed their attitudes and just are a very determined group of basketball players. They deserve this win and it is a great win for us.”A win that should give the Cats the type of national respect they deserve.