LEXINGTON, Ky. - My introduction to Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl was at an NCAA women's regional in Philadelphia last spring. He was there with UT athletic director Mike Hamilton, who had just hired him.

"You must have been on a fast break the last few days," I said.

"I live on a fast break," he said with a smile

I didn't fully appreciate that self-appraisal until the 75-67 upset of Kentucky on Tuesday night at Rupp Arena.

It's one thing to live at a fast-break pace. It's another to get results so fast and so spectacular.

Pearl has rebuilt the program as if he were being timed with a stopwatch. Building is supposed to take years, not months.

Yet here stands a formerly mediocre program on the cusp of the nation's top 10, leading the SEC East and establishing its superiority against the conference's marquee program.

You should have seen Rupp Arena on Tuesday night. The orange presence was striking.

And I'm not just referring to Pearl's bright-orange sports jacket.

There were pockets of UT fans scattered throughout an arena that is historically all-blue. And they didn't leave at the final buzzer. They stuck around to savor and record the moment.

As Pearl returned to the court following the postgame press conference, about 100 UT fans were waiting to express their appreciation. They cheered and took pictures of each other while Pearl did his radio show.

The locker-room celebration must have been even better.

"(Pearl) ripped off his shirt wrestler-style," UT forward Dane Bradshaw said.

Said teammate Chris Lofton: "It was scary seeing (Pearl) like that."

Pearl didn't provide details, but when he showed up for the postgame press conference he was wearing a warmup suit, rather than his now-famous orange coat.

Pearl said he made the change after sweating too much, and then, as if to reassure the UT fans, added, "The coat is fine."

He didn't take long to work up a sweat. Just eight seconds into the game, he was off the bench for the first time. Five seconds later, he was outside the coaching box, screaming commands to his offense at the far end of the court.

In the chaos of college basketball, you couldn't say this coach and his team are perfectly in sync. But they are at least working at the same tempo.

Pearl sweats and shouts a lot, but for all his courtside animation, he doesn't lose his focus. He keeps coaching.

His team responded similarly against the Wildcats. The Vols played with both aggression and composure, a combination that's foreign to so many teams. They repeatedly pursued the basketball at an almost desperate pace, yet deftly handled it when they got their hands on it.

Once, C.J. Watson raced out of bounds to catch the ball, and almost executed a timeout signal as he made the play. There's no statistic for that, but it's the kind of play that identifies this team. So was the play Bradshaw made in the last minute.

As Bobby Perry's 3-point attempt glanced off the goal, Bradshaw grabbed the ball, whirled and threw a strike to Lofton breaking down court. Lofton's layup gave UT a five-point lead with 45 seconds to play.

The Vols never lost their aggressiveness. They never lost their composure, either.

They held a lead for much of the game, lost it briefly, then took it back. They played as though they expected to win.

And they made the sign at one end of the court obsolete.

The young fan with the painted face and the fake blue hair held the sign high above his head for much of the game. "Fear Rupp," it read.

I doubt that's what Kentucky fans were thinking after leaving the scene of their team's third loss in five SEC home games.

Instead, I think they were wondering about the coach in the orange sports coat who had just won his first game at Rupp Arena. If he could take a program this far, this fast, what does that mean for the long-established order of basketball in the SEC?

Kentucky fans didn't want to hear the answer Tuesday night.