Auburn, Ala. ? John Vaughn was living every kicker’s nightmare. His field-goal attempts just kept missing their mark, five times in all, two of them with one of Auburn’s biggest games on the line.

The final margin seemed almost cruelly appropriate: LSU 20, Auburn 17. So did the final play, Vaughn’s 39-yarder hitting the left upright in overtime.

Things are going so well for the senior these days he doesn’t even mind the inevitable barrage of questions about last year. Never mind that an even bigger rematch between No. 3 Auburn and No. 6 LSU awaits Saturday.

“I can’t wait,” he said. “It’s going to be a good one.”

Can’t wait? But what about the missed extra point in a 10-9 Auburn victory two years ago when you got a do-over thanks to a penalty? And, of course, that dreadful 1-of-6 performance against LSU last year? The one where you missed a 49-yarder in the final seconds of regulation and an even bigger one in OT?

“That’s water under the bridge,” Vaughn said matter-of-factly. “I can talk about it. It doesn’t bother me at all. It’s been a long time since then, and I’ve played a lot of games. I’ve made a lot of kicks since then, and I’ve missed some.”

He hasn’t missed many, only twice in games since then. He has made six of seven field-goal attempts this season, including a 52-yarder against Washington State and a 55-yarder at Mississippi State. He has topped his previous career high of 43 yards three times in those two games.

None of those kicks came with the game on the line. Hardly any pressure, either, in the two blowouts. Vaughn isn’t worried about redemption, though – or even about a repeat performance.

“Kicking’s kind of like golf. It’s kind of a day-to-day thing,” Vaughn said. “You don’t look at what you did two years ago or one year ago. I’ve been hitting the ball solid lately. I’m just going to try to keep hitting it solid.”

Besides, he exorcised some of the LSU demons a few weeks after that disaster, kicking a short field goal with six seconds left to beat Georgia. But he says he had already gotten over that game in Baton Rouge.

“It felt horrible. I felt like I let everybody down,” he said. “I just tried to bounce back and make my kicks the next week and just tried to move on.

“LSU beat me one week, I wasn’t going to let them beat me two weeks in a row.”

That show of resilience was not lost on his teammates, who never publicly criticized Vaughn after the LSU game.

“If you’ve ever seen a player have a bad game, they can take it for a career almost,” linebacker Karibi Dede said. “To see him bounce back and rebuild his confidence the way he did and come into this season with his confidence as high as it is, it’s great to see.”

Vaughn was a preseason All-SEC pick last season, following a 12-for-15 season that included three field goals in the Sugar Bowl. Other than the LSU fiasco, he was pretty good (11-of-14), but still said kicks were “drifting a little bit” and causing near-misses.

Over the summer, he called his high school coach and talked to two other coaches who work with kickers in Florida. The outcome was a slight change in technique, and so far a bigger change in results.

“It was kind of a consensus, just get through the ball more,” Vaughn said. “When I get up through it, I make them. When I wrap my leg around a little bit, I miss them. It’s that simple.”

Dede said he watched Vaughn kick a 60-yarder over the summer off a tee.

“So I said, ‘Yeah, it’s easy when nobody’s holding the ball,”‘ Dede said. “So he had a holder come over, same spot, kicked it and made it with seven yards to spare. I was like, ‘Wow.”‘

Yeah, it’s easy when nothing’s riding on the kick. But what about with the game on the line against LSU? Vaughn said he’d accept that challenge, too.

“You’d like to blow anybody out if you can,” he said. But, he added, “I’d love the opportunity.”