The Garden, so loud for most of the first half, had gone eerily quiet. 

You could see the shift in the body language of St. John’s players. Deivon Smith, this team’s heartbeat, gingerly walked to the bench in a sling. Villanova quickly took control of the game. 

It had all the makings of one of those 1-2 combinations this program has absorbed for so long: Bad luck and a bad loss. 

The atmosphere had been sapped out of the once-raucous building. But something different happened on the way to what would’ve been a momentum-busting defeat.