If they had planned it out ahead of time, scripted it the way some of those football coaches do with the first 15 offensive plays of every game, they couldn’t have done it any better. Across 45 minutes inside Madison Square Garden, St. John’s managed to perfectly mirror the entirety of the Mike Anderson era.

The Johnnies were slightly undermanned. They showed flashes of brilliance. They offered fleeting swatches of hope. They endured a few too many extended periods of offensive ineptitude. They seemed primed for something special …

And at the end, they lost, 72-70, in overtime to Marquette.

At what presumably will be the end of Anderson’s 124-game tenure at St. John’s.

“Proud of our guys, proud of our effort,” Anderson said, earnest and dignified and professional right to the end. “I love this team.”

One more time, St. John’s is about to look itself in the mirror and try to identify what it is as a basketball program, and where it wants to go. At one time, this was the most stable of all college basketball machines. From 1936-92, just five men coached the Johnnies; they will soon be hiring their fifth since 2005, their ninth since Looie Carnesecca rode off into the sunset.

It is a sleeping giant in desperate need of a wake-up call. It is an erstwhile elite program craving someone to drag it back to where it used to be. It is a university that has one choice to make, and it is as clear and as obvious as the pinwheel ceiling at the Garden.

His present office sits 18 miles from where his future office should be.

It’s time to make the call, a simple one, 718 to 914.

It’s time for Rick Pitino.

It is a move that makes too much sense not to happen. Yes, Pitino will be 71 years old by the time practice opens next October, but if you’ve seen him on the sidelines in New Rochelle you know he still coaches with the fire — and the fury — of a man half his age, with a quarter of the 832 college victories Pitino has piled up at Boston U., Providence, Kentucky, Louisville and Iona.

Yes, he arrives with baggage, though he avoided NCAA punishment for the way things ended for him at Louisville, and you would suspect the three years he served in the employ of the Christian Brothers will offer a necessary penance for the other sordid stories that stained his time there.

These things change every few hours once the engines of the coaching carousel fire up every March, but one thing is abundantly clear, according to multiple sources on both sides: There is mutual interest for this to happen.

There is interest among many of the factions of the decision-makers at St. John’s to make a home-run hire and bring in a coach whose history at the college level all but guarantees a relevance for the Johnnies that they’ve only enjoyed intermittently for the past quarter-century. And there is interest by Pitino — born in Manhattan, raised on Long Island, ex-Knicks coach, New York to his core — to write his final coaching chapter in his forever hometown.

Stuff happens at this time of the year. Coaching pursuits sometimes seem to be gathering inevitability before they hit a brick wall at the 1-yard line. There are other intriguing candidates — starting with Hofstra’s Speedy Claxton, who’s number ought to be right behind Pitino’s in SJU AD Mike Cragg’s speed dial.

Claxton is young, he is gifted, he’s 45-20 in two years in Hempstead and has the Pride 24-9 as they await their NIT assignment Sunday night. He played seven years in the pros, and has shown an early facility in building a program. He would be a terrific hire.

But for now, he is a perfect backup plan.

For now, once St. John’s settles up with Anderson and thanks him for four years of honorable if underwhelming service, they have to focus their sights and their energies on Pitino. They have to call him, they have to woo him, they have to hire him.

St. John’s has been searching for a genuine coaching star ever since Looie galloped off into the sunset 31 years ago. Pitino brings that star. Better, he’ll bring a whole new era of prosperity to Utopia Parkway (or to Penn Plaza, because you can believe the Johnnies will play more than four games a year at the Garden if he’s there).

If you still care about college basketball in this town, specifically at the address on Union Turnpike that still matters most, it really is the only way to root.