Nashville — The first metaphor Pete Golding reached for was not a football one.

“It was a heavyweight fight,” he said, and then, a beat later, the part that mattered more: his team got “punched in the mouth a lot.”

Ole Miss won anyway. Lucas Carneiro’s 48-yard field goal left his foot with no time on the clock and split the uprights at Nissan Stadium, and the Rebels walked out of the Music City Kickoff with a 41–38 win over No. 24 Louisville, 57,390 witnesses, and a season that began the way seasons rarely do in early September — with actual information.

Most top-10 teams spend Week 1 beating someone by five touchdowns and learning nothing. No. 9 Ole Miss spent it discovering that its quarterback can throw two turnovers and still win the game, that its new deep threat is real, that its best running back is fragile in the way all running backs are fragile, and that its defense will surrender points in bunches to a quarterback making his first career start.

That is a lot of tuition for one night. Whether it was worth the price depends on what Golding does with the invoice.

Trinidad Chambliss’s first half was bad. He threw an interception. He fumbled — after converting a fourth down, which is the specific cruelty the position reserves for people who do something right. Ole Miss went to the locker room leading 10–6, which is not a scoreline anybody drew up over the summer.

His second half was a different sport. Three touchdown passes. A five-yard touchdown run. Twenty-one completions on 36 attempts for 336 yards by the end of it — his ninth career 300-yard game — and then, with the score tied at 38 and 1:28 on the clock and the ball on his own 25, the drive.

Third-and-6. Chambliss found Caleb Odom for 18. That was the whole margin. That was the season’s first real answer.

“I don’t know how many times he’s got to do it. You know, I mean that’s just who he is. I mean the kid’s got unbelievable competitive character.” Pete Golding, on Trinidad Chambliss

There is a temptation, with a quarterback this experienced, to grade him against perfection and call a two-turnover half a crisis. It isn’t. Everyone has bad halves. The thing worth measuring is whether a bad half metastasizes — whether the interception becomes a checkdown, and the checkdown becomes a punt, and the punt becomes a loss.

Chambliss kept swinging. That is not a small trait. Over fourteen games it is arguably the most valuable one a team can own, because it converts disasters into merely bad afternoons, and bad afternoons into wins.

Deuce Alexander did not appear from nowhere. He caught 44 passes for 684 yards at Ole Miss last season, and he arrived in Oxford from Wake Forest, and before that from Douglas County High in Douglasville, Georgia, the son of a man who spent three years in the NFL with the 49ers and Saints.

But Sunday was his first start as a Rebel, and he treated it like a statement of intent: 159 receiving yards, the first 100-yard game of his career, and two third-quarter touchdown catches that covered 62 yards apiece. One was a track meet. The other was a catch-and-run through a secondary that had no answer for his closing speed.

Two plays. Fourteen points. A game turned.

The downstream effect is bigger than the box score. Ole Miss returns enough proven talent that defenses will build their plans around known quantities. A second vertical threat — a real one, with 62-yard-touchdown speed — forces safeties deeper and makes crowding the line of scrimmage an expensive decision.

Which brings us to the part of the night Ole Miss would like to forget.

Kewan Lacy carried 17 times for 61 yards, which reads like a modest afternoon and wasn’t. One of those carries went a single yard into the end zone and tied him with Archie Manning for the fifth-most rushing touchdowns in Ole Miss history at 25 — a nice piece of symmetry in a season when the school is putting up a statue of Manning on campus.

Then his thigh gave out, and the medical staff kept him there.

“I don’t think it’s anything serious, but they didn’t feel like getting him back in the game was the right decision.” Golding, on Kewan Lacy

Encouraging. Also preliminary. Golding was speaking from the field, not the MRI room, and last year’s Doak Walker finalist is not a player Ole Miss can shrug about. Lacy is what allows the Rebels to dictate a game’s tempo rather than negotiate it. Without him down the stretch the offense still moved — genuine evidence of depth — but the burden shifted entirely onto Chambliss’s arm and the clock.

Ole Miss proved it can win with the plan broken. That’s worth knowing. It’s not a plan.

Carneiro’s 48-yarder should not be filed under routine, and the retelling shouldn’t sand down how hard it was. Kickers miss those. Kickers miss those in empty stadiums in April.

But this is now the second time in eight months that Ole Miss has handed him a season and watched him hold it. In the Sugar Bowl in January, with the Rebels and Georgia trading blows in a College Football Playoff quarterfinal, Carneiro hit a 47-yarder with six seconds left to win it 39–34.

A quarterback who can move a team in ninety seconds and a kicker who is comfortable from 48 are not separate assets. Together they are a threat that changes how an opponent has to defend the end of a game — the difference between needing a touchdown and needing forty yards.

Golding is now 3–1 as a head coach. All four opponents were ranked: Tulane, Georgia, Miami, Louisville. The only loss came to Miami in the Fiesta Bowl semifinal, 31–27, one round from playing for a national championship.

That résumé deserves respect, with an asterisk that cuts in his favor rather than against him: the first three came as an interim, after Lane Kiffin left for LSU in December and Golding inherited a playoff team in the middle of a program-record 13-win season. He kept it alive. That is not a normal way to audition.

Sunday was the first game that was fully his. He won it. He also spent the podium afterward cataloging why it was closer than it needed to be.

Louisville scored 32 points after halftime and erased a 38–24 deficit inside the final seven minutes. Lincoln Kienholz — three years on Ohio State’s bench, zero career starts before Sunday — threw for 307 yards and two touchdowns, ran for 69 more and the tying score, and accounted for 376 total yards against a defense coached by a man who made his name coordinating defenses.

Golding did not spin it. He described “a lot of missed tackles, a lot of communication errors that led to explosive plays,” said the communication issues are correctable, and then named the ones that worry him more: “lack of violence, right. And bad angles and not wanting to finish an effort.”

Then he took the blame for the rest.

“I should have done a better job in the second half with them, to be honest with you — and not put too much on them, which I probably did.” Golding, on his young defensive backs

A head coach who says that at his first regular-season podium is telling you something about how he intends to operate. It is also a problem he now has eleven weeks to solve.

Charlotte comes to Oxford on Saturday, and that is the last easy sentence on the schedule.

Because on Sept. 19, Lane Kiffin returns to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium wearing purple and gold.

Then it’s at Florida, at Texas in late October, Georgia in Oxford on Nov. 7, and at Oklahoma the following week. Against that gauntlet the ability to survive a bad quarter is not a luxury — it’s the entry fee. But surviving a bad quarter and preventing one are different skills, and only one of them scales.

Ole Miss won a game Sunday it had every opportunity to close out twenty minutes earlier. It won while losing the turnover battle 2–0. It won because its quarterback would not stop competing and its kicker would not miss.

Those are real strengths, and they’re the kind that hold up in November. But they are also the strengths of a team that keeps putting itself in position to need them.