AUBURN | By all accounts, Auburn men’s basketball is having one of its best seasons in school history. It needs just one win in its final two games to secure the fourth SEC regular season championship in program history.

That’s outstanding.

It’s also on track to be a high seed in the upcoming NCAA Tournament and freshman Jabari Smith is projected as one of the top two picks in the 2022 NBA Draft.

What else could you ask for?

Well, apparently a lot. And if you were on social media or message boards during or after Saturday’s 67-62 loss at Tennessee expressing your bitter frustration, I’ve got a message for you.

It’s OK.

I’m serious. It’s OK to be upset or disappointed. I guarantee the players and coaches felt the same after that game too.

Maybe not as publicly or to the same degree because they’re in the middle of this fight and working everyday to bring that championship home.

But they feel it too. They know they’ve helped raised the bar. It’s been a meteoric rise under Bruce Pearl the last five seasons including AU’s third SEC regular season championship, a second-ever SEC Tournament championship and a first-ever trip to the Final Four.

There’s every reason to believe the good times will continue into the coming seasons regardless of what happens over the next five weeks.

So it’s OK to be disappointed in losing three consecutive road games and that nearly being five.

It’s also OK to take a more pragmatic approach and realize that a record seven of the nation’s top 10 teams lost Saturday, that the SEC is one of the toughest, if not the toughest, leagues in the country and that the Tigers still have the best road record in the conference.

You should also know that Pearl and his staff are very good at their jobs and they’ve got a group of players that are self-motivated, work hard and want to get better.

Perhaps you’re right and it will be the guard play that ultimately keeps AU from reaching its potential. What exactly is that potential, again?

Or perhaps adjustments will be made, execution will improve and Auburn will make another magical tournament run.

All we know for sure right now is if they win at Mississippi State Wednesday night or against South Carolina at home Saturday, they will be champions.

And that’s plenty enough, for now.

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In today’s musical journey, we go back 36 years to the release of a movie that was based on the wrong interpretation of a song, which was re-recorded as part of one of the best soundtracks off all time. On Feb. 28, 1986, the movie Pretty In Pink was released. It was based on what was at the time a little-known song from the Psychedelic Furs, which was written by lead singer Richard Butler about a girl that thinks she’s popular but everybody is actually laughing behind her back. The original song, released in 1981, didn’t chart in the U.S., but was heard by legendary filmmaker John Hughes, who was inspired to write a screenplay for a movie of the same name.

Pretty in Pink, the movie, starred Brat Pack queen Molly Ringwald as Andie, a shy, middle class high school senior, who wears a handmaid pink dress to prom with her nerdy best friend, Duckie, played by Jon Cryer. It’s at prom that Andie and Blane, a boy from the nicer part of town played by Andrew McCarthy, finally make a love connection. The original script had Andie getting together with Duckie, but after test audiences reacted poorly to that ending, they did a re-shoot a few months later. Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (OMD) had originally selected Goddess of Love as the song for the ending of the movie, but wrote If You Leave in less than a day for the new ending.

For the soundtrack, the Psychedelic Furs re-recorded Pretty in Pink and the more new wave version charted in the U.S. and made it up to No. 18 in the UK. The big hit from the album was OMD’s If You Leave, which topped out at No. 4 on the Billboard 100. The soundtrack also includes several songs by New Order including Shellshock, Suzanne Vega’s Get to Know Ya, The Smiths’ Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want and Echo & the Bunnymen’s Bring On the Dancing Horses. Rolling Stone lists it among the 25 greatest soundtracks of all time.