GAINESVILLE — The Florida–Florida State rivalry died Saturday night at The Swamp, and the body barely twitched.

Oh, sure, technically the game was played. The helmets clacked. The bands played. The mascots waved. And, yes, the Florida Gators, behind bulldozing running back Jaden Baugh’s 266 rushing yards, ended their nightmarish season with a dominating 40-21 victory over Florida State — if you want to call surviving this mudslide of a football season a victory of any sort.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, with our neighbors and with whatever football gods we deeply wronged over the past decade: this season’s edition of the once-mighty rivalry felt more like two abandoned shopping carts drifting toward each other in a Publix parking lot.

The Gators ended their season at 4-8; Florida State at 5-7. Florida’s lopsided victory was like finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk after your car got repossessed. Sure, it’s a temporary positive, but it changes nothing about the bleakness of your situation.

Now Gator Nation turns its attention to moving on from the Lane Kiffin rejection and quietly Googling Tulane coach Jon Sumrall, who has emerged as the frontrunner for UF’s vacated head-coaching job and could be named as Florida’s new coach by Sunday afternoon. In other words, the Gators were hoping to board the Lane Train and will likely end up in a Jon Boat.

This was the Swamp’s first home game since Kiffin snubbed the Gators — a brush-off so devastating that fans reacted like a middle-schooler being dumped via text message. You could feel it in the air; that lingering sour pit-in-the-stomach heartbreak of a fanbase forced to downshift from imagining Kiffin’s swaggering arrival to debating whether the defensive-minded Sumrall is the “right cultural fit.”

It just goes to show just how far both of these programs have fallen. Florida–Florida State used to be The Game in this state. Used to be the Thanksgiving weekend feast — Steve Spurrier and Bobby Bowden trading haymakers, national titles on the line, entire seasons building toward this one glorious moment. Instead, this year’s game on Saturday evening at The Swamp felt like an obligation, like jury duty with shoulder pads.

This rivalry once determined the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl or the national championship. On this night, it would decide whether the Seminoles would pathetically get an invitation to the Gasparilla Bowl.

They didn’t.

Not even close.

Instead, after Baugh steamrolled the Seminoles for the second-most rushing yards in school history (behind only Emmitt Smith) and struggling UF quarterback DJ Lagway threw three TD passes, FSU athletic director Michael Alford now will absorb even more backlash for deciding to stick with embattled head coach Mike Norvell. It’s no secret that the only reason Norvell still has a job is because Florida State boosters collectively shook their couch cushions and came up about $53,999,982 short of covering his contract buyout.

You don’t want to keep a coach at $54 million. You get stuck with a coach at $54 million.

But at least Norvell still has a job. Billy Napier is already a ghost haunting the Swamp, drifting silently through the hallways like regret wearing an embroidered Gator Head polo. The Gators were coached by Billy Gonzales, who until his one and only victory Saturday night has looked less like an interim coach and more like a man who just inherited a condemned house and has gamely been trying to hold up the ceiling tiles with a broomstick.

Yes, Florida won, but the victory over a down-and-out FSU team still felt hollow. And this rivalry hasn’t just taken a year off; it has completely disintegrated.

For the second consecutive year, the two teams entered the game unranked — the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s.

And the Florida win and the FSU loss was the moment when everyone — every booster, every fan, every alum, every poor soul clutching a plastic cup of warm stadium beer — probably had the same thought:

Let’s just get this season over with.

Give the sellout crowd that filled the stadium credit for at least providing a decent atmosphere. Honestly, I expected this to be more like a candlelight vigil than a football game. I didn’t expect to hear cheers and boos, I thought it would be a collective sigh of exhaustion from both fan bases.

And, yes, there were actually FSU fans in the stadium, but they weren’t rowdy. They were more like tourists visiting the ruins of an ancient civilization: “Wow, I heard they used to win championships here. Fascinating.”

Look, rivalries are supposed to be emotional fuel — pride, bragging rights, hatred, history. But when both teams limp into the game with losing records; when one has already fired its coach and the other can’t afford to; when the most exciting storyline is which bowl game will tolerate you … the rivalry stops being a rivalry.

Saturday night wasn’t Florida vs. Florida State.

It was Melancholy vs. Malaise.

It was Existential Crisis vs. Budgetary Restraints.

Florida may have won on the scoreboard, but nobody truly won on this night.

And as the lights dimmed over The Swamp, you could almost feel Bowden shaking his head from the heavens and Spurrier shaking his from a stadium luxury suite, wondering how their beloved programs had turned a once-glittering rivalry into a soggy, slow-motion pillow fight.

The Gators won big.

But the rivalry?

It’s gone.

All that remains is the hope — faint and flickering – that someday someone will resurrect it from this pit of irrelevance.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on social media @BianchiWrites and listen to my new radio show “Game On” every weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen