Electric St. John’s-UConn clash will have chance to rival these all-time Garden classics

The thing about sports is, you can’t offer a money-back guarantee for outcomes. Those are going to be decided by flesh-and-blood human beings, and they are entirely out of our control. Also: You never know when you’ll get an amazing moment that simply falls out of the sky and gets you when you weren’t looking.

(I have maintained for 25 years that the single-greatest game/match I ever saw was a badminton match I wandered into at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Malaysia vs. South Korea, with 3,000 screaming Malaysians on one side and 3,000 screaming South Koreans on the other. It was as thrilling to watch as any World Series, Super Bowl or Final Four game I’ve ever seen live.)

But you can anticipate all you want.

And that can also be imperfect. At the start of the season, Sunday’s UConn-St. John’s game seemed like a must-see but for different reasons than it’s become: The Huskies were two-time defending champs, the Johnnies upstart challengers for Big East supremacy. Three months later it’s still certain to be an electric afternoon at Madison Square Garden, and has picked up steam because the Johnnies have been so good.