Let me get this straight:

Wednesday night game.

Between the teams picked in preseason to finish last (Georgia) and next-to-last (Tennessee) in the SEC Eastern Division.

You know what Thompson-Boling Arena looked and felt like Wednesday night?

It looked and felt a lot like it did last Saturday when the two marquee teams in women's basketball, Tennessee's Lady Vols and Connecticut, battled it out before a record crowd.

"Saturday was an event. Tonight was an event,'' said Bruce Pearl.

An event!

Tennessee and Georgia, men's basketball, on a Wednesday night in early January, and it's an event!

Pearl's Vols won the event, 89-76. They're 11-1, off to a 2-0 SEC start.

The crowd was announced at 21,612 and that figure wasn't far off the number of fannies in the seats.

It was the biggest crowd of the year for men's basketball, a couple of hundred more than the season-opener for ETSU.

It was 5,000 bigger than any crowd last year. It had to be a record for a Tennessee-Georgia game.

"When I walked out there around 6 o'clock for shoot-around,'' said sophomore guard JaJuan Smith, "the student section was already wild.

"They was on the Georgia players. When we go on the road, we hear that a lot. I always wanted that when people come here, to have to go through the same thing we go through on the road.''

Harassing opponents? What's going on around here?

There was, it turns out, a hypnotist on hand for the halftime show. It's entirely possible he spent the previous 48 hours hypnotizing the city, making it believe this was Duke vs. North Carolina.

On the contrary, a more likely explanation is that Pearl, the new coach, and his over-achieving, hustling, entertaining team have awakened a populace that had been hypnotized to sleep by mediocrity.

If this was an event, wait until No. 2-ranked Florida gets here a week from Saturday.

Ah, a word of caution about that.

Not to rain on anybody's parade but there is a distinct possibility the Vols are in for adversity before Florida comes to town.

They go to LSU on Saturday, to play a bunch of big, bruising Tigers. Then they go to No. 5 Memphis on Wednesday.

Let's not sell the Vols short. They did, after all, run Texas out of its own building. They did come from 15 down in the second half to win at South Carolina.

Pearl, like all members of his fraternity, prefers to take 'em one at a time. His one for the moment is the Georgia event.

"We beat Georgia at home,'' he said. "We held serve. We did what we were supposed to do.''

Still, it was remarkable to witness 20,000-plus witnessing two teams picked to go nowhere even within their own division.

But predictions are often worthless. This, in fact, was a pretty good game between two pretty good teams.

If anybody in the SEC has improved more from last year to this than Tennessee it is Georgia.

The Vols were underachievers last year, often painful to watch in their march to 14-17.

Georgia was worse, 8-20 worse.

Coach Dennis Felton played five different walk-ons in Knoxville last March, including one who started and played 40 minutes.

No walk-ons saw the floor this time. It was an honest and hard-earned win by Tennessee.

As for the rest of the SEC East, Florida and Vanderbilt are likewise improved from a year ago. Kentucky and South Carolina have slipped but they're not bad.

That leads to say that there should be more events to come this winter for a facility generally cursed for its expansiveness.

If Wednesday was any indication, the big house is going to seem a lot cozier this winter.

"I've been in buildings all my life that were too small,'' Pearl said. "I wanted to have a problem coaching in a building everybody said was too big.

"It didn't look too big tonight.''