PHILADELPHIA — The Big East schedule makers thought they booked one heck of a main event.

Pittsburgh vs. Villanova. Season finale. No. 1 vs. No. 2 with the conference championship on the line.

Time for a rewrite. The Panthers lived up to their heavyweight billing while the Wildcats were knocked out of the title picture weeks ago.

All No. 4 Pittsburgh has to do is beat slumping Villanova at 4 p.m. Saturday on CBS to win the outright Big East championship and earn a No. 1 seed in next week’s conference tournament at Madison Square Garden.

“We want to be the only champion in the Big East,” Pitt forward Gilbert Brown said. “We’re going to do our best to bring it home.”

The Panthers (26-4, 14-3) are in wonderful shape to finish the season with a net-clipping celebration at the Petersen Events Center. The Panthers are 5-3 vs. Top 25 teams, already have defeated Villanova this season, and have won the last seven consecutive games in the series in Pittsburgh, including a 3-0 record vs. the Wildcats in The Pete, their new home which opened in 2002.

The Panthers clinched at least a share of the league title with Notre Dame this week after a 66-50 victory over struggling South Florida.

“We don’t want to share it, that’s for sure,” guard Brad Wanamaker said. “We want to go out and end our careers at Peterson Events Center the right way.”

The Panthers survived a brief absence from leading scorer Ashton Gibbs, and still have a shot to take Manhattan as the top team in the toughest conference in the nation. Pitt has entered the Big East Tournament as the No. 1 seed only two times in school history: 1988 and 2004.

This year, though, the Panthers stayed atop the standings after they were picked No. 1 in the Big East coaches’ preseason poll.

“Knowing people had confidence and faith in us, then to actually come out and do what we’ve done this season has meant a lot,” Brown said. “We’re out to prove everybody right.”

What a refreshing change from teams that vow they’ll win it all to silence the doubters.

Brown, Wanamaker and Gary McGhee already are one of the most successful senior classes in school history and are determined to end their careers with the Final Four trip that has eluded coach Jamie Dixon and the Panthers.

But Dixon has done just about everything else. In fact, he hit his own milestone in Wednesday’s victory, setting an NCAA Division I record for most victories in the first eight seasons of a career with 214. That’s one more than Everett Case had at North Carolina State, and Roy Williams had at Kansas in their first eight years.

The 19th-ranked Wildcats (21-9, 9-8) were picked second in the Big East. But they’ll likely be lumped with traditional also-rans like Seton Hall and DePaul in the first round of the conference tournament Tuesday. The Wildcats’ free fall from 16-1 to the worst ranked team in the poll was impossible for coach Jay Wright to imagine weeks ago.

Villanova has lost three straight games and five of seven overall.