ATHENS, Ga. — The wildest game many had ever seen had just ended. Players and coaches from both Georgia and Georgia Tech were lingering, shaking hands, comparing notes, celebrating and consoling. Amid all that, Mike Cavan, a 76-year-old former Georgia quarterback, assistant coach and now staff member, grabbed someone close to him by the arm.

“Best win of all time,” Cavan said.

The best? Cavan won an SEC championship as a player, recruited Herschel Walker, was an assistant on the 1980 national championship team and has been on the sideline during all of Kirby Smart’s run. The best?

“Best all-time win over Tech,” Cavan said.

That’s a clarification that still says plenty: Before Friday, if you told Georgia people they would need eight overtimes to get a 44-42 home win over Georgia Tech in a game they were favored to win by nearly three touchdowns, the reaction would probably have been … ugh. In the more sober light of morning, they still may end up feeling that way.

But after the way this went — trailing 17-0 at halftime and 27-13 with five minutes left in regulation and then going eight overtimes, including the last six in a two-point shootout — perspective could wait.

Georgia coach Kirby Smart, left, and Georgia Tech coach Brent Key shared a long embrace after Friday night’s eight-overtime thriller. (Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)

Quarterback Carson Beck called it “one of the most emotional games I’ve been a part of.” Linebacker Jalon Walker said he was nervous for his grandmother, who came to the game for the first time. Many Georgia fans left after Georgia Tech went up 14 with 5:37 left in the game. But many stopped or circled back to watch from the bridge over the west end zone.

What they witnessed:

• Beck hitting Dominic Lovett with a 17-yard touchdown with 3:39 left to make it 27-20.

• Georgia safety Dan Jackson forcing Georgia Tech quarterback Haynes King to fumble, which was recovered by Georgia. Jackson is the one connection on defense with the 2021 unit who was on the field for Kelee Ringo’s famous pick six, then was a part of his own moment on Friday night.

“That hit-fumble will be one for the ages,” Smart said.

• Beck and Lovett connecting again for a 3-yard touchdown with 1:01 left, tying the score.

The next minute then saw Georgia Tech try to get in field goal range, get stopped at Georgia’s 45-yard line, then Beck get sacked on a Hail-Mary try. That forced a back-and-forth of emotions. No one could know it was just beginning.

Georgia had practiced the overtime rules — one drive each from the 25-yard line in the first two overtimes, then a two-point shootout after that — before the Texas game last month. But this was the first time going through it for real.

“We go over the situation but not every single day,” tight end Ben Yurosek said. “So a couple people were probably asking around, making sure (the third overtime) it was a two-point shootout.”

• In the first overtime, Beck hit London Humphreys for a touchdown. But King answered with a scoring pass for Georgia Tech.

On to the second overtime, and Georgia Tech started with King scoring on a 1-yard run, but the rules required a two-point try. It failed. Georgia got the ball, and Beck right away connected with Cash Jones on a touchdown pass. The Bulldogs could have won the game with a two-point conversion but also missed.

• It was time for the two-point shootout, an ironic twist for Smart: If Georgia lost this game, his decision to go for two after Georgia’s third-quarter touchdown would have loomed large. There was still 9:53 left in the quarter when it happened, and Smart seemed to acknowledge later it was a questionable decision.

“Yeah, interesting question. I’m not going to dig real deep in,” Smart said. “It is analytics, and we follow almost to a tee. It’s what our chart says. It ended up looking really interesting because you (could have kicked) an extra point to win the game.”

GO DEEPER

How Georgia survived against Georgia Tech in 8 OTs

But that time, it was the third overtime, and nobody had that choice. The only strategy was in which plays to call, and even then, there were no huge surprises: Georgia Tech offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner was at Georgia from 2020-22, and Smart said his coaches recognized a lot of the two-point plays the Yellow Jackets were running. But Faulkner surely knew which calls were in Georgia’s playbook and was telling his fellow coaches. Maybe that’s why there were so many failures.

• The offenses both failed in the third and fourth overtimes. Then Georgia converted with Beck hitting Dillon Bell. Georgia Tech answered with King completing a pass. Then the sixth and seventh overtimes, which were both failures for each team. In all, the second team could have won the game on four of five exchanges but didn’t.

“It just was weird that it seemed like every time somebody failed, they had to go again,” Smart said. “So you gotta get over that, then they would fail, and they had to go again.”

• Finally, the eighth overtime. By this time, Georgia’s defense was being aggressive, going after King on every play, just from a different place each time. Georgia linebacker CJ Allen went right at King, who heaved a pass out of the end zone.

Beck and the Georgia offense took the field. So did Nate Frazier, a freshman tailback, who might have seemed like a decoy as both teams basically had been passing in overtime. Georgia offensive coordinator Mike Bobo called a run-pass option, a play the Bulldogs had used earlier.

“But not in that way, if that makes sense,” Beck said. “We run the same play in a lot of different ways.”

This time, Beck saw the look of the defense, and when the moment came, he gave the ball to Frazier. The hole was there, he burst through it, and the game was finally over.

Walker was later asked about his reaction when Frazier scored.

“I don’t know, you tell me,” he said, laughing. “My mind went blank.”

It took a couple of moments for everyone to realize it was the game over. Smart went to the postgame handshake with Georgia Tech coach Brett Key, and instead, they embraced for a while. Smart and Key both coach at their alma maters and played against each other in the 1990s, and they have a healthy respect for each other, especially after this game.

“Nobody knows what it’s like to sit on that sideline and go through that pain and the highs, the lows that, ‘We’re going to win, we’re going to lose, we’re going to win, we’re going to lose,’” Smart said. “I mean, he was emotionally spent, and so was I.”

After a few minutes of exultation, almost all of Georgia’s team had to be called back out of the locker room for a ceremony at midfield, where Georgia governor Brian Kemp gave the state trophy to Smart and his team for the seventh straight year. The team came back out still smiling. Maybe that was part relief, but there was genuine celebration.

Still, it leaves the question: For Georgia to struggle against a team it was supposed to beat easily, on its home field — where it has not lost a night game since 2009 — what does that say?

“It shows the resiliency of this team,” Yurosek said. “No matter what happens, what we’re faced with, we’re ready to put our heads down, keep working, no matter the situation. It shows a lot about this team and its character.”

Whether the College Football Playoff committee sees it the same way will be reflected in the penultimate rankings on Tuesday. Either way, Georgia can make it all moot by winning the SEC championship next week against Texas or Texas A&M. The winner gets a bye into the quarterfinals. And by pulling this game out against their state rivals, the Bulldogs almost certainly will be in the field either way: A 10-2 regular season featuring wins at Texas and over Clemson and Tennessee earn some leeway to survive a game like this.

Still, when asked if this win ensured at least an at-large bid, Smart said he wouldn’t answer but then seemed to acknowledge the stakes of those overtimes.

“If things went the other way on one of those plays tonight, we’d be playing next week for our lives,” he said.

Indeed, a spot in the Playoff was on the line, and it came down to essentially a series of coin-flip overtimes. It was a bizarre way for things to go down. There will be time to dissect and argue about what it means and should mean in the coming days and two weeks.

But in the immediate aftermath, Walker, Georgia’s defensive leader, only could shake his head.

“I mean,” he said, with a smile, “I haven’t ever seen anything like that.”

(Top photo of Carson Beck: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)