With 47 seconds remaining in Saturday’s game, John Thompson III finally sat down. Perched on the end of the scorer’s table near the Georgetown bench, the fourth-year coach watched Jeremiah Rivers dribble methodically, wind up and sink his free throws. For the first time all afternoon, Thompson let go a sigh of relief.

Until that moment, JT III had been huffing and puffing, stalking and stamping, doing everything possible to pull his team through a sloppy victory over the pesky Fairfield Stags.

Saturday was one of those once-in-a-blue-moon games where the Georgetown Hoyas wear their white unis, the better basketball team plays its absolute worst and the underdog seems to be at its unmitigated best.

The Stags – coming off an embarrassing loss to St. Francis – were nearly perfect in the first half, shooting an astounding 42 percent from three-point range, yet led but once and managed only a tie by half time. Fairfield guard Jonathan Han scored 17 points, missed twice the entire game and played full-throttle for a game-high 37 minutes, but in the end, he could not come through.

“For 38 minutes, we played the best we played all year,” Fairfield Coach Ed Cooley said after the game, looking almost as happy as if his team had won. “We shared the basketball, limited our turnovers. … I am very encouraged by our effort.”

On the other end, fifth-ranked Georgetown played its worst game of the young season. The stingy Hoya defense allowed 31 points in the first 20 minutes after surrendering only 18 to a Michigan team that was light years ahead of the Stags. Georgetown’s terrific trio of scorers – Roy Hibbert, Jessie Sapp and Jon Wallace – combined for only 22 points.

The 61-49 outcome spoke to the depth of this Georgetown team. That the Hoyas could shoot an appalling 41 percent from the charity stripe and still win is encouraging. That Roy Hibbert – the team’s leading scorer and rebounder – was held to seven points and four boards by a rag-tag bunch of Fairfield “big men” may be alarming, but the emergence of DaJuan Summers – who hit a pair of nail-in-the-coffin threes in the second half – in Hibbert’s stead is reassuring.

Knowing his small lineup – which featured no player taller than 6-foot-8 – could not withstand the power of a 7-foot-2 center, Cooley employed a “hack-a-Hibbert” strategy, which sent the big man and his cohorts to the line 11 times. After Georgetown failed to capitalize on its opportunities, you can be sure there will be some extra free-throw shooting – and wind sprinting – during practice this week in McDonough Gymnasium.

“A whole lot of lessons are going to come out of this game,” Thompson said afterward. “[Our free-throw shooting] was horrible. That has to be fixed. We are just giving away points. There has to be some balance.”

Many of Georgetown’s shots seemed to defy the laws of physics in the way they rattled deep into the basket only to rattle back out somehow. Wallace – who came into Saturday’s game needing only 12 treys to pass Kevin Braswell as the best three-point marksman in Georgetown history – hit only three of eight from beyond the arc.

“He’s a silent assassin,” Cooley said when asked what he thought of Wallace. “He is the best point guard in the country.”

Georgetown also played virtually the whole game without its other backcourt stud, Sapp, who injured his head shortly after the opening tip.

There were moments when the crowd of 8,764 was reminded just how vastly superior the home-team Hoyas were. Like when Patrick Ewing Jr. treated them to one of his crazy Cirque du Soleil reverse dunks in the first half. Or the time DaJuan Summers shoved Han’s shot back in the point guards’ grill with four minutes left. Or when Ewing and Summers took turns slamming home fast-break dunks for the last four points of the game.

It’s good that Georgetown got one of these out of its system early – especially with dangerous road games looming against a deceivingly good Alabama team Wednesday night and a menacing Memphis squad on Dec. 22. At the very least, this game proved that Georgetown is a team good enough to win when nothing goes right. But don’t expect to see the dress whites again.