The Kentucky football team found its heart Saturday night in a heartbreaking loss to Auburn. It may – may – have found some type of a defensive identity as well. UK put together a furious second-half comeback against No. 8 Auburn at Commonwealth Stadium, rallying from a 31-17 halftime deficit to tie the game at 34-34. A Kentucky defense that was gashed and gave up the lead ultimately rallied the Cats back into the game, but a game-winning field goal by Auburn as time expired spoiled what would have been UK’s biggest win of the season.Auburn won 37-34, adding misery to a long and documented past of devastating losses.”My heart aches for these guys,” head coach Joker Phillips said. “They played their hearts out. We asked them to come in and prepare like champions on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and we got that. We prepared like a big-time football team’s supposed to prepare. Our guys were into it, played hard, played inspired, played with emotions and made plays when we needed to have them made. (We) just came up a little short.” It’s hard to judge where this UK team will go after such an emotional loss. In one aspect, the Cats had the No. 8 team on the ropes. A Heisman Trophy candidate, Cameron Newton, who was unstoppable all season long, was at least contained in the second half. And yet, in the glass-half-empty outlook, UK falls to 0-3 in the Southeastern Conference, finds itself in the midst of a three-game looming streak and the Head Ball Coach, whose South Carolina team knocked off Alabama on Saturday, is coming to town next week. What do we make of Saturday?”I always knew what this team was about,” Phillips said. “This team will fight you until there are zeros on the clock.  This team has heart, there’s no question about that.  I hope everybody else recognizes that.”The heart of two individual performances by Randall Cobb and Mike Hartline nearly willed UK to victory. Cobb, in typical spectacular fashion, was a one-man offensive machine. Cobb became the first player since Shane Boyd in 2003 to throw a touchdown, catch a touchdown and run for a touchdown. His three touchdowns Saturday tied Craig Yeast’s career mark of 32 scores.”This guy’s the best football player I’ve ever been around,” Phillips said.  “(He) just makes plays. From the time he’s got the ball in his hands, something exciting is going to happen.”Meanwhile, quarterback Mike Hartline just continues to go about his business. While people  continue to call for Morgan Newton to get a shot at QB, Hartline just keeps plugging along as one of the best quarterbacks in the Southeastern Conference. On Saturday, Hartline finished 23 of 28 for 220 yards and a touchdown. Two of his incompletions were just flat out drops. “Hartline’s playing his tail off for us,” Phillips said. “Please, you’ve got to recognize that. You have got to recognize that Mike Hartline’s playing like an SEC quarterback’s supposed to play. He hasn’t taken sacks.  He didn’t turn the ball over at all tonight. He made some big-time throws. The slant throw to Randall, that is a big-time throw.  That is an SEC quarterback.”If Hartline hasn’t won those few dissenters over by now, he may never, because there’s not much else he can do. He’s one of UK’s best strengths on the team. Other than put a helmet on and help out the defense, what do people expect?The difference Saturday night was the defense – both good and bad. In the first half, Newton shredded a Kentucky “D” that has struggled all season, allowing a score on every single Auburn possession. Newton strolled, walked, cruised – whatever you want to call it – to four first-half touchdowns, totaling 261 yards of total offense.The defense, the game and the future of the season looked hopeless as the SEC’s hottest quarterback did whatever he wanted to whenever he wanted to.And then, as if Micah Johnson, Corey Peters, Trevard Lindley and some of the UK defensive stalwarts of last year gained another year of eligibility and reappeared on defense, Kentucky turned everything around. Players that couldn’t tackle tackled. A defense that didn’t contain stayed in its gaps. And a team that appeared lifeless and left for dead in the first half came back to life and played with more emotion than it has all season long.”We made a couple plays and got them stopped, and therefore you start playing with a little bit more excitement, a little bit more energy, a little bit more juice,” Phillips said. “After the first interception, it got the defense going and the stops started coming after that.”After playing as if he was the second-coming of Tim Tebow in the first half – you know, that guy they called “Superman” down in Gainesville, Fla. – Newton looked human in the second half. “We started containing No. 2,” said linebacker Ronnie Sneed, who finished with five stops and a tackle for a loss. “In that first half, he was running wild. Once we got a lockdown on that, it balanced it out and they weren’t moving the ball as effectively. We ran some different fronts and changed our alignment on some plays to try to take away a lot of those outside plays.”The 6-foot-6, 250-pounds quarterback still racked up 149 yards of offense in the second half, but compared to what the rest of the country has done against him, those numbers seemed pedestrian. The only number that counted, anyway, was UK’s ability to hold Auburn to just three points in the second half – until a back-breaking, 19-play, game-winning, field-goal drive to end the game. “The way we finished in the second half, if we played like that in the first half we would have won this game,” said Winston Guy, who picked off Newton in the third quarter for his first career pick.Speed, not a change in schemes, defensive coordinator Steve Brown said, was the difference in his unit’s effort in the second half. A team that looked like it was running in sand in the first half flew to the ball in the third and fourth quarters.”We had a lot of guys that had never been in that fast-pace-type deal before,” Brown said. “Those guys had to catch their breath. All we said at halftime was, ‘You got it now? Reach your keys, attack and play hard.’ In the second half, they did a (heck) of a job. A break here or there and who knows what would have happened.” (UK nearly caught one on the final drive on an Auburn fumble out of bounds. Randall Burden recovered the ball, but, after a reviewing the play, the refs ruled he didn’t have possession of the ball in bounds.)UK is now six games into the season, though. As Phillips alluded to earlier in the week, nobody on this team is young anymore; everybody should be used to playing Division I, SEC football at this point. If the UK defensive players weren’t used to the speed, they have to be now.This league and these teams UK will face the rest of the way are about speed and physicality. Maybe UK discovered that in the Saturday night. Maybe it didn’t. But if this team wants to win in the second half of the season, it will have to mirror the second-half defensive effort everybody had been waiting for until Saturday night.