Villanova and St. Joe’s weren’t defined by one loss. They won’t be defined by Wednesday’s result, either.

A horn sounded in University City the night of Nov. 13 and the Penn undergrads burst onto the Palestra court, their Quakers victorious as a sizable underdog vs. then-No. 21 ranked Villanova, a Big 5 rival.

The loser walked off the court with plenty of work to do, expectations to live up to, and a bevy of irritated fans. You should have seen the message boards and social media commenters. Villanova coach Kyle Neptune needed to be fired. The program was swan diving into the territory of also-rans. Jay Wright wasn’t walking through the door.

Four nights later, a horn sounded in Wynnefield and an offshoot Texas university, in Division I for only 16 months, had pulled off a shocker vs. the St. Joseph’s Hawks as a 20-point underdog.

The loser walked off the court with plenty of work to do, expectations to live up to, and a bevy of irritated fans. You should have seen the message boards and social media commenters. St. Joseph’s coach Billy Lange needed to be fired. The program, picked fifth in the preseason Atlantic 10 poll, was toiling away. Phil Martelli walks through doors in Ann Arbor these days.

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The point of this exercise is to realize the month of November hasn’t yet ended, those two things happened two weeks ago, and don’t things feel a bit differently for each program today, the morning when they’ll meet for the latest installment of their long rivalry?

At Villanova, it’s a lot different. The Wildcats (6-1) have won four straight, including three games in three days in winning the Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas. The Wildcats are back in the Associated Press Top 25 at No. 18.

On Hawk Hill, things are different, too, though maybe not quite as dramatically. The Hawks responded to losing to a school many probably had to Google to confirm was really a Division I team (Texas A&M-Commerce) by nearly knocking off Kentucky last week, a team now ranked 12th in the nation. They were a free throw and a defensive stop away from winning in regulation, then fell in overtime.

St. Joe’s then earned a nine-point win (right around the point spread, for those dialed in on expectations) on Sunday vs. Sacred Heart in a game the Hawks didn’t even play all that well in.

To be clear, the point of this exercise wasn’t to criticize the fan, either. Paying customers and university donors will always have the right to do their thing. But 40-minute sample sizes will never define a basketball season or a coach. Both Neptune and Lange know that.

Neptune’s response that night inside the Palestra might sound like coachspeak, but it’s what he really believes.

“If we would have won that game and snuck that out, we would have had all the same things we still have to get better at,” he said.

Lange knew that was the case for his guys, too. He was proud of the way they hung in defensively on a poor shooting night. But he thought they were a bit “frenetic, mentally and psychologically.”

They won’t always be that way. They just were that night.

“It just defines that one game,” Lange said. “You figure out what you have to fix and then you move on. Your job as a leader is to not let it spiral into something and not overreact.”

There were takeaways. Plenty of them.

“What I took from that,” Lange said, ”is, ‘OK, we still have to mature.’ I have to protect them from unrealistic expectations, both individually and collectively. We still have to go through a journey.”

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He called his team out on their ability to block out all of those things. Three nights later, you could make the case that they should have walked out of Rupp Arena with a win. Kentucky coach John Calipari even said his team was pretty lucky to get to overtime.

In reality, St. Joe’s is 4-2. The Hawks are, however, also a few layups and a missed free throw away from being 6-0. A win Wednesday over Villanova and they’d probably be getting Top 25 votes.

Neither coach is in the moral-victory business — both focus on the overall view of their teams and in trends. In the information age, that’s the way it’s done. Yes, they want to win every 40-minute sample, their brains will always be wired that way, but because that is a futile endeavor, they focus more on trajectories. That Kentucky game, Lange said, was “a great growth point for our team.”

Wednesday night will be another data point, positive or negative, for both teams. Villanova, on its home court, will enter as a favorite, perhaps by double digits, but anything can and will happen inside those 40 minutes.

Lange has been around this area long enough to know that this one holds a little more weight. It won’t change the philosophy on how he judges where his team is at on its season-long journey, but there are stakes. St. Joe’s has one win in its last 15 tries and has lost 11 straight vs. Villanova, where Lange used to be an assistant coach. The winner will head to the Big 5 Classic championship game at the Wells Fargo Center on Saturday (7 p.m., NBC Sports Philadelphia+, Peacock).

“It’s a game against college basketball royalty. That is what Villanova is,” Lange said. “They are a legitimate blue blood. This team is a legitimate Final Four contender. And that is coupled with the fact that if you play in the city of Philadelphia, the Big 5 is a big deal. It’s a big deal to our universities. It’s a big deal to our constituents. It’s a big deal to the fabric of the city and so it’s a big deal to our players.

“On the other side of it, it’s only one win or one loss. It does not define the season, nor define the amount of work we have to do to keep moving forward.”

From Hawk Hill to the Main Line, it’s the same line to walk. Forty minutes of basketball is, after all, just 3% of a season.