If you play enough soccer games, you’re bound to lose a few. All the greats have lost games that left fans scratching their heads. But the way you lose and win is almost as important as the final outcome of the game. Alabama football lost to Vanderbilt. It still doesn’t make sense to type it out. It happened.

It’s as disappointing a loss as the Crimson Tide, and I’ve been watching it for over 30 years. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of stinkers in my life. LA Monroe in 2007, Northern Illinois in 2003, Louisiana Tech in 1999. None felt like this one.

Because this Alabama team was the reigning SEC champions, having beaten No. 2 Georgia a week ago in Tuscaloosa and was on top of the world. Now they’ve lost to a team that has never in its history beaten an AP Top 5 opponent in a stadium that’s probably 75% Alabama fans. The game might as well have been played at Bryant-Denny Stadium, except for the rowdy Vanderbilt student section.

But even more disappointing than the loss itself was what happened at the end of the game, after ‘Dores’ QB Diego Pavia iced the game with a first down run and once again faltered an Alabama defense that looked like it was chasing ghosts brought.

Fifth-grader Malachi Moore is a leader on this team. A man you look to for determination and guidance in uncomfortable moments. A man whose handprints are already on Denny Chimes and whose handprints will be there for the second time after this season, an honor not achieved by many others.

Moore is one of the few players remaining from Alabama’s last national title team in 2020. A true Nick Saban guy who played four years under the best head coach in the history of the game.

And yet, when it all came crashing down and the Crimson Tide officially realized they had actually lost, it was Moore who let his emotions get the best of him, completely losing it and throwing a tantrum on the field.

When the game was iced, he threw Pavia’s helmet to the ground for the first time. After the first Pavia knee, Moore kicked the football after the referee spotted him, cheered on the referee and taunted him when the flag was thrown. Afterward, he threw his mouthpiece in disgust and was somehow left on the field by Kalen DeBoer and the coaching staff when he should have been sent to the locker room sooner.

It was a breathtaking moment. A collapse unlike anything we had seen in the Saban era. There is passion, and the Alabama players have shown plenty of it in the Saban era. Sometimes this passion boils over. The BCS title game against Notre Dame featured the infamous Barrett Jones kick on AJ McCarron, a play that was well in hand for the Crimosn Tide.

Ronnie Harrison and Reuben Foster were there on the sidelines of the 2016 season opener against USC, a game Alabama won 52-6.

After the surprising loss to Tennessee two years ago, Jermaine Burton fought with a fan.

These things happen, but this one was hard to watch. Moore was a passionate player, DeBoer said after the game. We all know it, we’ve seen it for five years. We would have liked the entire team to show more passion throughout the entire 60 minutes of the game and for it not to take over after the game was decided.

It was one of those moments that makes it clear that we are in a whole new era of Alabama football. A moment that would have been quickly mocked by Saban in the moment had he been standing on the sideline.

Instead, Moore remained on the field throughout his seizure. There is a certain expectation when you put on the purple and white. When you wear a “C” on your chest and are the captain of a young defense that draws a lot of attention, expectations are higher.

Coach Bryant once said, “I hate losing worse than anyone, but if you never lose, you don’t know how to behave. If you fail in humility, you can come back.”

How DeBoer handles it and how Moore responds will speak a lot about the culture of a locker room searching for answers after a shocking loss. And it will be the deciding factor in whether Alabama can come back.