Arin Gilliland has battled through indescribable adversity in her four years as a Wildcat to cement herself as the best player in the history of the Kentucky women’s soccer program. With all that in mind, Gilliland deserved a winning sendoff.But 13 minutes into a Senior Night match against Alabama, UK yielded a tying goal.”We gave up the goal on my mistake,” Gilliland said.As disappointed as she was in herself, allowing the goal only served to turn her final regular-season home match into more of a fairytale finish. In the 86th minute, Cara Ledman’s corner kick found Kaitlin Miller, who headed the ball for a goal and a 2-1 victory for No. 24/18 UK (13-5, 8-3 Southeastern Conference).”My team backed me up and they picked the team up and they got another one,” said Gilliland, whose run toward goal forced the corner kick. “They found a way. Those are the kind of games that I live for, when my team finds a way to win in a tough situation. That’s why this win is so special to me.”Making it even more special is the fact that UK almost certainly would have lost this game had it been played six weeks ago.”It wasn’t an aesthetically pleasing game, but sometimes you gotta find a way to grind it out,” head coach Jon Lipsitz said. “These are the exact wins earlier in the year that were losses. We just didn’t grind out the difficult ones and I think that’s part of our big change.”Before the “big change,” UK had lost four times in six matches. The Cats entered the season with high hopes, but were all of a sudden perilously perched on the NCAA Tournament bubble. Since then, UK has won six matches in a row to secure the No. 3 seed in the SEC Tournament and make a strong case for a national seed in the big dance.For that reason, Senior Night was hardly a farewell for this class of Gilliland, Stuart Pope, Emma Brown and Maddie Lockridge.”It feels great, but I’m not sending them off,” Lipsitz said. “We’ve got a lot more to do.”That starts in next week’s conference tournament at 3:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday against an opponent to be determined. As decorated the winningest class in school history is, these seniors have never won a game in the SEC Tournament. Gilliland is going to do everything in her power to change that.”I never give for-sures, but I’m going to give everything I have and I know my team is going to do the same because they have a completely different attitude this year,” Gilliland said. “They have this aggression about them. They have this really tough mentality and they want to win.”Lipsitz credits Gilliland and her fellow seniors for creating that toughness.”What I right now love about this group is when things were hard we buckled down and we found a way,” Lipsitz said. “That’s what our program’s about and that’s the legacy these four are leaving us.”