Stars didn’t align

NEW YORK – Better late than … what?

Never being able to stop the bleeding from your eardrums?

Just imagine if college basketball’s matchmakers, Madison Square Garden, ESPN, Duke and Gonzaga had somehow been able to get it together and match the Blue Devils and Bulldogs here a year ago.

With Adam Morrison.

With J.J. Redick.

With no end to the hype and hysteria that already attended their every move last basketball season.

Imagine if Dick Vitale had been able to lock his mighty mandible on that one. The “e” – as in “bay-beeeeeee!” – would have echoed from here to Hong Kong.

“I can’t imagine it,” said Gonzaga forward Sean Mallon.

Meaning he probably doesn’t want to.

It took years of searching for the right mojo to put Duke and Gonzaga together on a basketball court – one year too many, in some minds.

Which is not to suggest their 6 p.m. PST meeting tonight at Madison Square Garden is an anticlimax, or that it still isn’t one of the marquee games of the season.

But it’s not what it could have been.

Which is too bad. And also good.

In the consensus Player of the Year (Redick) and its consensus Celebrity of the Year (Morrison), the Dookies and the Zags had the two most compelling characters to share a season since … who?

Bird and Magic?

They dueled for the scoring title, they played Halo over the Internet and talked to one another on the phone. And they did it while playing for two programs that the national media just can’t seem to get enough of.

Actually playing one another would have almost been too much.

“It would have been like (Lew) Alcindor and Elvin Hayes all over again,” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few, referencing the 1968 showdown in the Astrodome that pitted the big men from UCLA and Houston and drew an unheard of 52,693. “I really think it would have been that big.

“It would have been amazing last year. It would have been the most watched college basketball game in years. There was so much hype and focus on those two guys, and they did a great job of living up to it. It would have been great to do it last year.”

David Pendergraft had another word for it.

“It would have been nuts,” he laughed.

Pendergraft and Mallon and the rest of the Zags were part of the traveling circus that Few alternately compared to a Rolling Stones tour and playing with “the fifth Beatle.” From having to use aliases at the team’s hotels to seeing the gauze he used to stop a nosebleed put up for bid on eBay, Morrison unleashed a mania the little school in Spokane could hardly have envisioned. Redick was not nearly the cult figure Morrison was, but he was a worthy sidekick as a scorer – and he did play for Duke.

“I’m sure it would have been the ESPN Full Circle thing,” Pendergraft said. “Every channel, every magazine, every newspaper.”

Said Mallon, “The hype would have been unbelievable. The hype with those guys was unbelievable anyway and they didn’t even come close to play each other.”

And why was that?

College basketball schedules aren’t like football, in which out-of-conference games get booked two-to-10 years in advance. Yes, there are some home-and-home series that are multiple-year deals, but these neutral court spectacles are generally made-for-TV affairs put together in the off-season. Duke, naturally, is a popular attraction, but there are limited opportunities. Last year, the Blue Devils played road games at Indiana and Georgetown and a neutral court game at the Meadowlands against Texas.

“It’s hard to put these together,” said Few. “We’ve been trying to work it out for several years now, make it work for both programs – and ESPN helped in putting this together.”

And the Zags certainly aren’t looking at it as being a year late and two superstars short.

“People might not be as excited as they would have been last year,” Mallon said, “but for us, any time you get a chance to play Duke in New York at the Garden, that’s the ultimate. I’ve been here five years and I’ve wanted to play Duke ever since I’ve been here.”

Said teammate Jeremy Pargo, “A year ago it would have been J.J. vs. Adam, not Gonzaga vs. Duke. In one sense, you’re kind of glad it didn’t happen last year.”

Which is not to say it’s still not big.

“Interestingly, I got an e-mail from a guy at ESPN, of all people,” said Jerry Krause, GU’s director of basketball operations and the house booker, “wanting to know if we had any extra tickets. Now, if ESPN can’t get any…”