Gut-check win will serve St. John’s well when games mean even more

Mike Williams had the ball, and soon he slipped it over to AJ Staton-McCray, and when the layup nestled into the basket there were 16 minutes and 3 seconds left in the game and Seton Hall had just polished off a 9-0 run and seized a 15-point lead and Madison Square Garden felt like the wrong side of a tomb.

These 24 minutes at the Garden suddenly bore an eerie parallel to the bookend 24 minutes the Knicks put together just 24 hours earlier. The Johnnies looked utterly perplexed and the Pirates were jubilant, and it looked like they were about to lie in state for 40 minutes the way the Knicks had for the full 48 on Monday.

“That’s when something clicked,” Bryce Hopkins would remember later. “That’s when we decided to play every possession like our life depended on it.”

Rick Pitino had another way of putting it.