No. 19 Kentucky plays the final game of its regular season on Saturday, visiting 15^th-ranked Missouri in Columbia. UK head coach Mark Pope has enjoyed the season, but he admits that it has gone by really fast.

“It’s so fast. It’s too fast, actually,” Pope said. “We get to play our last game of the regular season on Saturday. It’s been a epic, dramatic, incredible, wonderful, painful journey, all the things that you want and we can’t wait to get to the postseason.”

Kentucky has clinched at least the eighth seed in next week’s Southeastern Conference Tournament. The Cats could finish as high as fifth, depending on what else happens on the final day of the regular season. Pope admits that he and his staff have examined the possible scenarios.

“Now, we’re doing it a lot because it’s fun,” Pope said. “It’s March. This is the best. We love every bit of it.”

Pope saw his Cats make 12 of 32 shots from beyond the arc in Tuesday’s 95-64 win over LSU. The UK head man was happy to see his team shoot at least 30 threes in the win.

“For probably the last six to eight weeks, we’ve just been trying to stay above water, managing all of the changes,” Pope said. “For the first two or three months, we were just focused on getting better and then we went through a period in the season where we just had so much change to our roster and rotation, we were just like, how do we survive. This will be our third straight game where we have the same unit out on the floor. There’s some real comfort that comes with that. We’ve got to have pace in the game because that’s when we play our best. So I was really pleased with that number.”

The Cats will now face a Missouri team that has bounced back from going 0-18 in the league last year to a 10-7 mark in the SEC this year. Pope admits that he admires what Missouri head coach Dennis Gates has done this season.

“I’m really happy for him because I’m a huge fan of his,” Pope said. “I think he’s one of the really special coaches in college basketball.”

Pope knows that the Tigers will be a formidable opponent for the Cats.

“They have incredibly capable shooters who are dangerous,” Pope said. “They have the ability to focus in on some places they want to attack and come back to them over and over again. We run a lot of the same actions offensively, we value spacing the same way offensively.”

Pope hopes that his team can carry the momentum from Tuesday’s win into Saturday’s game, then into the postseason.

“I think this league is really spectacular. I think you want to get every single win you can,” Pope said. “We would love to win, we would like to go into the SEC Tournament on a bit of a run.”

The regular season comes to an end on Saturday, and while it has flown by, Pope and the Cats are hoping that there’s plenty of season left.