MARANA, Ariz.

Different month, different desert, same shocking outcome.

Any thoughts of Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods going head-to-head late Sunday afternoon came crashing down under darkening skies in the high desert of Dove Mountain. Just like the last time they got together in Abu Dhabi to start the season, they didn’t even make it to the weekend.

The Match Play Championship was even worse. They didn’t make it out of the first round.

“It happens,” Woods said. “It’s the nature of the format. You’ve just got to beat the guy you’re playing against, and I didn’t do that today. Chucky won the match.”

That would be Charles Howell III, who says he has never beaten Woods in any match and picked a fine time to end that streak.

Doing his best Tiger impersonation, the match was all square when Howell nearly holed out with a wedge for birdie on the 15th, and then drained a 25-foot birdie putt on the 16th, going 2 up when Woods missed a 12-foot birdie.

The match ended in pars on the next hole.

Just moments earlier, in a sloppy match with an old friend, McIlroy had one last chance to avoid losing to Shane Lowry when the portly Irishman went bunker-tobunker on the 18th hole. McIlroy, from the middle of the fairway, hit yet another poor iron shot into the sand and Lowry closed him out by saving par with a nervy 4-foot putt.

“It’s definitely a day I’m going to remember,” Lowry said.

McIlroy became the third No. 1 seed in the last four years to lose in the opening round. Woods has yet to make it out of the second round of golf ’s most unpredictable tournament since he won at Dove Mountain in 2008.

It was only the second time in the 15-year history of this World Golf Championship that the top two seeds were gone after one day. Woods and Phil Mickelson lost in 2002 when it was at La Costa.

Woods and McIlroy losing in the first round just minutes apart?

Not many would have given that a snowball’s chance in the high desert. It capped off a wild opening round, stopped on Wednesday because of a freakish snowstorm that covered The Ritz- Carlton Club in 2 inches of snow.

And those two stars getting knocked out wasn’t even the half of it.

Sergio Garcia returned Thursday to face a 12-foot birdie putt to win his match. Five holes and 19 shots later, he finally put away Thongchai Jaidee in 20 holes. Their match ended just more than 30 hours after it began.

Bo Van Pelt hit only two shots Thursday — an 8-iron and a 45-foot lag putt — to finish off John Senden.

This tournament already is so strange that it will take three days to complete the opening round. Carl Pettersson was 1 up over Rickie Fowler with one hole left, and Gonzalo Fernaysketball Center, his mind racing back more than three decades.

“It was the premier rivalry during the history of the Big East,” Boeheim said as he contemplated the end of an era. “At one time, for a 10- or 15-year period, it was probably the No. 1 rivalry in the country. It’s had a lot of emotional games, a lot of close, tough, hard battles right down to the end. It’s really been a great rivalry for both schools.”

Boeheim was talking about Georgetown-Syracuse, a rivalry unmatched in its heyday in the 1980s when the Big East Conference was in its infancy. A rivalry that will have a different feel after this season when Syracuse leaves to join the Atlantic Coast Conference.

“It’s not the same when you’re not in the same league,” Boeheim said. “It will never be the same.”

The teams have played 87 times since 1930, and 20 games have been decided by two points or less, 39 by five or fewer, and 12 that have gone to overtime.

They meet for the final time as conference members in the Carrier Dome on Saturday. That’s the reason students have been camped out all week to be part of an NCAA on-campus record crowd of 35,012 that will transform the stands surrounding Jim Boeheim Court into a raging sea of ora