BATON ROUGE, La. – It was an all too familiar feeling.The Kentucky softball team had just lost in walk-off for the third time in five days to Tennessee, this time in the first round of the Southeastern Conference Tournament.That didn’t make it any easier.”This game, it’s hard to swallow,” UK head coach Rachel Lawson said. “A lot of the games that we’ve played lately are hard to swallow.”The loss came after the Wildcats had built leads of 2-0 and 3-1 on the Lady Volunteers. UK (29-24) seemed unlikely to relinquish the lead with Kelsey Nunley on the mound in the postseason, but Tennessee (40-13) charged back anyway for a 5-4 win on a two-run single off the wall in left field by Meghan Gregg.As Nunley’s pitch count climbed, the Lady Volunteers began to hit her harder. Nunley stranded runners in scoring position in two of the first three innings, but she was unable to escape trouble in the fourth and fifth, allowing three runs, and she was lifted for Erin Rethlake. Rethlake, a true freshman, looked unfazed in her first postseason appearance, but two walks and an error undid her and UK in the seventh inning.”We’ve done some things really, really well,” Lawson said. “We just need to figure out how to finish games. We need to figure how to close games and we need to clean up some things. We played most of the game well, but when you’re playing at this level and you’re playing a team of this caliber you can’t make mistakes and you certainly can’t make mistakes at the end of games because I think people take advantage of that.”UK, which now will await its NCAA Tournament fate and Sunday’s 10 p.m. ET Selection Show, will have to cut out some of those mistakes to duplicate last year’s run to the Women’s College World Series.”The postseason really comes down to pitching and defense and hopefully get your timely hits,” Lawson said. “So I think it’s important that we spend the next couple of days focusing defensively, really trying to tighten that up.”To go with that, Wildcat pitchers will go to work refining things.”It’ll be nice to have a few days in a row to work on things in the bullpen,” Lawson said. “We really haven’t had that luxury a lot lately. So to be able to have a few days to tighten up some of our pitches, make them break a little bit better, not keep them on the same plane, I think is going to be a big deal.”Though certainly and understandably disappointed after their seventh loss in a row, the Cats are ready to take advantage of a few days off and a chance to improve.”It was a tough game, but we can just learn from it,” said Maisie Steed, who had two hits against Tennessee.” That’s all we can do, is learn and move on and get back to Lexington and start working on things we need to work on and hopefully take it into the NCAA Tournament.””We just gotta get back to Lexington and get back to work and hopefully just think of the postseason as a fresh start, try to turn things around,” senior catcher Griffin Joiner said.