“I gave up. You did, too. We were out of it and gone.”

Larry Munson bellowed those words in 1980. Nov. 8, to be exact, the afternoon that Lindsay Scott caught a pass from Buck Belue to beat Florida, hanging on to an undefeated regular season that ultimately resulted in a national championship.

The same words could have applied Saturday night (and Sunday morning). On Dec. 31, Georgia scored 18 points in the 4th quarter for an arguably even more miraculous win over Ohio State, 42-41. Depending on how you were watching/listening, the Buckeyes missed that field goal with maybe 20 seconds to spare on 2022 (via radio antenna) or football and Times Square ball/peach/gnat might have come down precisely together (via television).

It was a pretty good night. Quite an unexpected one, but it sure was good.

Of course, that’s if you like Georgia Bulldogs football. I can understand everybody else being a little cranky. Once reliably underachieving, Georgia’s now one of those rich teams that seems to win everything. An Alabama that barks.

For most fans, this probably isn’t Georgia’s greatest win. When your program stretches back to 1892 and you’ve been pretty darn good during most of it, you tend to have plenty of choices. It’s not like the Atlanta Falcons where the choices pretty much boil down to the 2017 win over the Packers and the 1998 win over the Vikings. UGA people have actual choices and plenty of them.

Winning over Ohio State may not rank in the top 10 Georgia wins ever. You might be the type of fan who looks at the prestige of the game. You might be the type of Georgia fan who votes with emotion and has a special place in their heart for that shimmy Trinton Sturdivant did on Florida. Either way, there have been tons of similar contests.

Regardless of how you rank your Bulldogs’ wins, it’s going to be hard to argue that few were more absolutely perfect. I mean, pitch the idea for this game and you might win an Oscar. Look, you might even win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Nations that have never seen American football would fawn over this. The game had that much drama going for it.

There were the stakes. Winner moves on, loser goes home. There were the odds. Ohio State was the No. 4 seed and feeling pretty disrespected about it. There’s also the part where even though only two teams had one loss (TCU being the other), it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch for the committee to have voted for Alabama or Tennessee for the fourth spot.

Georgia, the clear-cut No. 1 based on being defending national champions, were pretty shaky against Missouri and Kent State. The perhaps undeserved No. 1.

There were the usual array of injuries, both leading up to this game and during it. Marvin Harrison Jr. hurt the most, knocked out of the game on a hit by Javon Bullard in the 3rd quarter. Darnell Washington and Chaz Chambliss were less heralded, but still big blows. Washington is as good a blocker as he is pass-catcher and Chambliss left Georgia’s linebacking corps even thinner than they already were.

You had the behind-the-scenes storylines. Stetson Bennett is the perpetual feel-good story, just good enough to be noticed out of Pierce County High School, then his own box office hit about how he rose to the top. Arian Smith and Adonai Mitchell were their own mini-stories.

Going into Saturday, Mitchell had five catches on the season, none since September. Smith had caught two passes. Injuries had kept both out nearly all season, but here they were, working their way to co-stars after the Buckeyes mostly tied up Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey went in injured and spent his whole night noticeably limping.

There’s the game itself. The Bulldogs were down 14 points in the 2nd quarter, tied it and then went ahead 24-21. Then immediately gave up a 55-second, four-play, 75-yard drive to fall behind again. Ohio State went up 14 points in the 3rd before Georgia scored 18 points in the 4th.

It was one of those special games where little was done wrong by either team. There was one particularly Smart play, Kirby Smart calling the timeout to top all timeouts a millisecond before Ohio State could run a fake punt.

The end saw Georgia land the bigger blows and finally get a good pass rush on C.J. Stroud. As one of those dastardly stuck-up SEC people who mostly thinks of the Big Ten as the yippy dogs of football, I wasn’t expecting Stroud to be that good. Y’all, he was that good. So was Emeka Egbuka and Harrison is as much a fly in the ointment as his father.

I listened to the game on radio, as nature intended. Since I went out at 11:30 to wait on the Gnat Drop, I missed seeing a few plays. Sunday, I caught the 2nd half on an ESPN rebroadcast. The announcers built up Noah Ruggles, the poor Buckeyes kicker, to an absurd extent. They touted his leg strength, his accuracy, how much this was a dream for him to be playing for Ohio State.

Until that final kick, Ruggles was 17-of-19 on the year. Almost perfect.

Add another layer of drama. Jack Podlesny, whom you might remember kicking an extra point for Glynn Academy at Brodie Field in 2017, missed two early field goal tries. Podlesny redeemed himself, albeit under much less pressure. Not only was there the field goal to get Georgia back in it, it was truly he who provided the game-winning point after the catch in the corner by Mitchell with 54 seconds left.

Throw in the time. Essentially midnight when it ended. On the very last play.

Folks, yeah we’ve probably seen bigger than this, but we may not have ever seen perfection like this.