MORGANTOWN — What transpired Monday night at the West Virginia University Coliseum with the Mountaineers losing an important home game to Villanova leads to an interesting discussion, which mainly is whether or not you can create a truly great event or if it just happens.

Certainly, this most current meeting between WVU and Villanova had all the trappings to put it on its own pedestal. It was a Big Monday in the Big East, a nationally televised game between Top 5 teams involved in a race for their conference championship.

There was even the necessary sideshows, beginning with it being the first game since the WVU student body had embarrassed itself against Pitt, with a strong police presence, with new rules and regulations for behavior in place.

Then there was the matter of Da’Sean Butler against Villanova, a team he lit up on that very same floor just one year earlier for 43 points. The anticipation for all of this was almost matching the birth of anyone’s first child, but it turned out to be nothing but a false pregnancy.

All you needed was a classic game, but that never materialized. Neither team brought it’s ‘A’ game, the Mountaineers actually turning in a rather lackluster, uninspired performance, one that would have been better served coming on a Wednesday night on the road at DePaul.

The point is that you just can’t create great games. They happen on their own, sometimes with great buildup, sometimes coming unexpectedly.

And face it, the game is the attraction, not all the hype. A 31-6 Super Bowl, it turns out, is anything but super, whether you use the capital S or not.

About the only two requirements for a game to become a great event is to have something important at stake – which really was an ingredient lacking on Monday night – and to have that presents something extraordinary, be it a team or individual performance, good or bad.

This turned the mind to some of the great basketball games that were been played by West Virginia in the decade that ran from 2000 to 2009, which was the second golden age of WVU basketball. Indeed, both John Beilein and Bob Huggins renewed the basketball program both spiritually and in the area of achievement.

They brought in players who were talented and fun to watch play, which led to important games that had much riding on them and that were closely contested, filled with intrigue and athletic achievement that is seldom seen.

Which were the great games of the 2000s and why were they great? Let us take a quick trip down memory lane. One can suggest that you may disagree with the order, but it is difficult to disagree with their inclusion on the list.

The two games that come to mind as No. 1 and 1a, it matters not which you prefer to put on top, were in consecutive years, each in the one-and-out setting that is the NCAA Tournament, one a victory, one a defeat for the Mountaineers, but each perfect examples of March Madness.

It is probably best to put the game of March 19, 2005, up first, for that certainly was the longest game and, perhaps, the most thrilling, West Virginia overcoming a 13-point deficit to beat Wake Forest battling two overtimes in Cleveland, 111-106, late in the night.

It was a game that defined John Beilein basketball and one that etched Mike Gansey into WVU lore, for he scored 29 points, 19 of them in the overtime periods, then said the words that every athlete hopes someday to say, “This is a dream come true.”

The second game on the list was a nightmare come true, a Sweet 16 matchup with Texas on March 23, 2006, a game in which Kevin Pittsnogle, his nose stuffed with cotton to stop the bleeding, hit a long-distance 3-point shot with five seconds to play to tie the game.

It was an amazing shot at an amazing time and the video, which you still can see before WVU games on the video board, of Pittsnogle pounding himself on the chest heading back down the court is classic, but the ending turned the game into something straight out of fiction.

Texas’ Kenton Paulino, with barely time to get the ball up court, put a 3-pointer in on top of Pittsnogle’s, winning the game and turning emotions so quickly that it left your head spinning.

If that loss was disappointing, so, too, was the loss that came a week after the Wake Forest miracle in 2005, for just when it seemed like the Mountaineers had become Destiny’s Darlings and rushed to a 20-point lead in the first half against Louisville, they could not fight off the Cardinals charge, saw the game go into overtime and fell in a classic, totally sapped of energy, lying on the floor at the Pit in Albuquerque.

There is just something about elimination games that you cannot capture in the regular season, for the heroics are so much larger, just as it was Darris Nichols pumped in a last-second shot from the corner on March 29, 2007, to give the Mountaineers the NIT championship on a play where he wasn’t really supposed to be the shooter.

Games keep coming back include the way the Mountaineers and Gansey beat Villlanova in the semifinals of the Big East Tournament in 2005 by a 78-76 score or the way the Mountaineers fought their way into the Big East semifinal last year only to fall before Syracuse.

So many games, so many great games, including Butler’s 43-point outburst against Villanova last year, a point total not seen in the Coliseum by a WVU player since the 1970s, and West Virginia coming home in 2000 after losing at Pitt, 63-46, and stunning the Panthers, 69-68, in what proved to be Gale Catlett’s final game coaching in the Backyard Brawl.

The shame is that Monday night’s game fell short of reaching levels like that for in reality those are the games that make sports so big a part of most Americans lives.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.