St. John’s taking fans on beautiful joyride that is still baffling at times

This had all the trimmings and all the trappings of a harsh 40-minute lesson, a reminder that the impulse for hubris always has a heaping husk of humility lurking just around the bend. The Xavier Musketeers, fresh off a stunning win at No. 7 Marquette, were poised to double their pleasure Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden.

This time it would be St. John’s who would endure the harsh tutorial that earning official designation as a Top 20 team comes with a few dyspeptic side effects — such as freshly affixed targets on their backs. Anyway, that’s sure what it looked like with 17 minutes and 2 seconds left in the second half, when Xavier’s Marcus Foster knocked down a 3.

That made the score Xavier 50, St. John’s 34. That made for a very quiet Madison Square Garden, and a profound buzzkill for the 14,545 inside.

And that makes what happened across the final 22 minutes and 2 seconds so extraordinary. You may already know that the Johnnies won the game 79-71 in OT, because if someone accidentally left one of the Garden’s doors ajar, you could’ve heard — all around the city — the raw roar that accompanied just about every second of the 45-21 assault that closed the game.