Are UKidding me?

The unbeaten, No. 1 Wildcats turned Miles’ bold prediction of victory into a sick joke Thursday night, winning their 37th game of the season by overwhelming and overpowering WVU, 78-39, to advance to the Elite Eight while Bob Huggins and his team left the arena hoping someone got the license plate of the truck that ran over them.

The 39 points tied for the second fewest by a WVU team in 54 years.

So ends WVU’s season with a 25-10 record while Juwan Staten’s career as a Mountaineer comes to a conclusion with 1,260 career points, including a team high 14 in his final game.

Miles, on the other hand, had a deer-in-the-headlights performance as Kentucky took him to task, ending his first WVU season by going scoreless and missing all three of his shots from the field and his two free throws.

The Wildcats came out like an angry caged animal after their cage was rattled late Wednesday afternoon by Miles. What is it they say about “out of the mouths of babes?”

Well, the freshman Miles got to flapping his jaw in the midst of a gaggle of national media types, all of them hungry for a fresh story to put to a stale story line, following Wednesday’s practice.

And they got it.

Oh, did they get it, Miles predicting victory over Kentucky.

He didn’t do it by just saying something like “I think we will beat them” or anything as dull as that. As always, Daxter was “miles” ahead of the field.

“I give them their props. I salute them for getting to 36-0. But tomorrow they’re gonna be 36-1,” he said.

Moments later there was a phone call to New York.

“Hold the back page,” a reporter had to his editor at the New York Post.

Now, you have to understand the New York Post. It’s a sensationalize tabloid, founded in 1801 by no less a patriot than Alexander Hamilton, and it is known for its headlines.

Most famous?

HEADLESS BODY

IN TOPLESS BAR

Then there was KHADAFY GOES DAFFY and GRANNY EXECUTED IN HER PINK PAJAMAS.

And now Daxter Miles Jr. of Baltimore, Md., had his own place in back page history.

The back page had a cutout file photo of Miles, his mouth wide open shouting something — as he is want to do in his trash talking manner, with sort of a cartoon bubble coming from it containing this:

‘I give them their props … but tomorrow they are going to be 36-1’

The main headline blares out for all 8 million New Yorkers to see:

MIGHTY

MOUTH

West Virginia says it will

knock out perfect Kentucky

As hard as it is to imagine, Miles had knocked the New York Yankees and A-Rod off the back page of the hometown paper.

His brash prediction was out there for the world to see, and if it would come true it would go along with some of the other great predictions in sports history:

Joe Namath predicting his upstart Jets would defeat the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl III …. Cassius Clay predicting he would knock out Sonny Liston in the first round of their rematch, and when it happened he poetically declared “They all fall in the round I call.”

There was Babe Ruth calling his shot and Mark Messier guaranteeing the New York Rangers would win the Stanley Cup before 1994’s Game 6 while trailing New Jersey, 3-2.

Now you had Daxter Miles out there and not worried about it at all.

“They should be more intimidated, because they’re the ones who have the high standard, and we’re coming for them,” Miles said.

Kentucky certainly wasn’t intimidate as they came out and took a 7-2 lead, but more important before 2 minutes were gone WVU’s best inside player, Devin Williams, was on the bench with two fouls.

And it didn’t get any better as the Wildcats were completely dominant as they built a 14-2 lead, WVU looking for its second field goal when they called a time out at 13:33 mark. With the game in danger of being turned into a blowout, Huggins put Williams back in despite two fouls.

Not that it mattered as the lead swelled to 18-2 with Marcus Lee soaring almost as high as the second level for an alley-oop dunk.

A time out would follow as one of the officials fell trying to keep up with Kentucky on a break. Losing an official would have been critical, for at that moment with 11:50 on the clock, WVU led the officials just 2-0.

At 11:15 the Mountaineers got their second basket as Staten buried a 3 and that seemed to loosen the Mountaineers up as they added another basket from Jonathan Holton but Kentucky kept pouring it on and as the clock went under 10 minutes it was 22-8.

Kentucky continued to do to WVU whatever it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it, tripling the Mountaineers score at 33-11 and by halftime it was an embarrassing 44-18 lead.

Staten, playing his final game as a Mountaineer, had half the team’s points while Miles finally quiet, having missed his only two shots.

And, as hard as it is to imagine, it got worse in the second half as it took eight minutes for WVU to get its first field goal, “narrowing” Kentucky’s lead to 54-21, but it became a run — if you can call back-to-back field goals a run — when they stole the ball and Tarik Phillip scored.