Villanova’s win over No. 9 St. John’s showed the allure of what could have been. Is it too little, too late?

Like any middling college basketball team, there’s a good version of this Villanova basketball team and a not-so-good version. You rarely know which one you’re going to get.

Wednesday night at the Finneran Pavilion, where Villanova knocked off No. 9 St. John’s, the good one showed up.

Tyler Perkins made a clutch three-pointer to win it. Eric Dixon started slow but finished strong. Wooga Poplar took over the game with 22 points. Jhamir Brickus took care of the basketball and settled the offense. A few dozen students dressed up in banana costumes and helped the crowd go, well, bananas. The Wildcats outlasted the toughest team in the conference. They packed their defense in and made a poor three-point shooting team try to beat them from beyond the arc. They finally won a game at the end even if it looked at times like they didn’t want to.

A Villanova athletics communications staffer passed around a handwritten note to the media with a few stats on it moments after the final horn sounded. The win, the note said, marked the first time in 20 years that Villanova had a third win over a ranked opponent in the same season at the Pavilion. It marked the first time in the building’s history that the Wildcats had beaten two teams ranked in the top 10 at home in the same season.

The intent of the note, of course, was to share a newsworthy nugget. History-making wins are worth mentioning. For those of us who look for the metaphors and symbols, though, it was another reminder of what this season could have been, but has not. How many teams beat a top-10 opponent twice at home and don’t go dancing? How many teams have three ranked wins at home and find themselves in the precarious position the Wildcats are in with six regular-season games to go?

“I think we have a big-time team,” Villanova coach Kyle Neptune said when asked about the historical stats. “I think our guys know that on any given day, if we come out and we play hard and together there’s nobody that we can’t beat. I think that’s pretty evident in the thought process throughout our locker room.”

On its face, it’s true. The Wildcats beat ninth-ranked St. John’s, 73-71, on Wednesday night. They beat then-No. 9 UConn on Jan. 8. They beat a Cincinnati team that early in December was ranked 14th but is now 5-8 in Big 12 play.

» READ MORE: Villanova finally shows its best self in pulling away from Xavier for an 80-68 win

Those wins, though, have been wiped away on the resumé with the kind of losses that derail seasons. Forget the home Columbia loss in game No. 2, hard as it may be. You get a little forgiveness for a stinker against a team of returning players in the portal era when you’re starting from scratch the way Villanova was.

Focus instead on the cough-ups. There have been a few. Villanova wasted Dixon’s 38-point outing in November vs. Maryland, a team now ranked 25th. It led by 12 at the half and by a point inside of 30 seconds. The Wildcats led Xavier by six on the road with five minutes to go on Jan. 14 before being outscored by 21-9 the rest of the way. They led Georgetown at home by eight points with less than three minutes to play and somehow lost.

The basketball gods haven’t been kind, either. Creighton guard Steven Ashworth’s game-winning, banked-in corner three-pointer at the Wells Fargo Center on Feb. 1 was as cruel as it gets. Poplar had done everything in his power to win Villanova that game only for luck to not be on Villanova’s side.

Flip two of those games, namely the Xavier and Georgetown losses, and you’re looking at a team that’s 17-8 and 10-4 in the Big East and probably in the NCAA Tournament.

Luck happened to be on Villanova’s side Wednesday. A 12-0 St. John’s run turned an 11-point Villanova lead into a one-point deficit with seven minutes to play. Dixon, an 85.7% free-throw shooter, later missed the front end of a one-and-one with a two-point lead. Simeon Wilcher made Villanova pay with a three-pointer at the other end, and Neptune called timeout. The Wildcats called a play, but knew there was a chance St. John’s would blitz screens and blow the play up. That happened, and though Neptune said he thought about calling a timeout, he decided to trust his team to make a play. Poplar drove and kicked to the corner to Brickus, who hit Perkins on the wing for the winner.

Wilcher got a decent look at the other end out of a timeout but missed.

“Good teams win games like this,” Neptune said. “You have to have multiple games like this throughout a season to be a good team. That’s just what it is.”

» READ MORE: Villanova’s Wooga Poplar is eager to see his return to Philly equate to more wins for the Wildcats

You could say the same about bad teams, too. Bad teams lose the kind of games Villanova has lost. The Wildcats blow eight-point leads in three minutes. They give up the open look that leads to the banked-in three. They commit a foul on a three-point shooter like Villanova did in its road loss at Xavier.

Does any of that make wins like Wednesday frustrating to think about? That there’s a good basketball team there that hasn’t always shown itself?

“That’s good to think about, but what is that going to do for us right now?” Neptune said. “It’s not going to do anything for us. I think about it, like, hey, if you don’t have certain struggles, maybe you don’t get to these points. Sometimes it makes you better. It alerts you to certain things. Sometimes guys need that, even sometimes as a coach, you just need it. It just is what it is. There’s no reason to look back. We have another game in a couple days and that’s all we’re going to worry about.”

There are six to go starting Saturday at Providence (6 p.m., CBS Sports Network). The Wildcats, at 15-10 and 8-6 in the Big East, have no more margin for error. Their very slim dreams of an at-large NCAA Tournament bid rest on winning something like five of the next six, which would mean beating UConn on the road or Marquette at home … or maybe both. They will probably be favored to win in four of those six contests. You could read all of that and wince. Or you could look at what happened Wednesday night, in Villanova’s third consecutive win, and cling to a little hope.