For me personally, I'd attribute a crush to something more akin to infatuation and a slight obsessiveness (ie: thinking about them constantly, accidentally imagining them close to you as you drift to sleep, being terrified of their nearness, etc.) whereas attraction is more like "ah, yes, this person is someone I find (subjectively) appealing," but without the aforementioned qualities of infatuation. If you have the former, you generally have the latter, but if you have an attraction, you don't necessarily have that crush kind of quality to it.
This is a bit of a tangent but, I'd argue even that while it's hard to have a crush without attraction (lucidly observed) it's totally possible to have that tropey anger/rival crush, where you have a latent attraction you don't want to give a voice to (and that can be fun when employed! I just don't think it's something we've seen in this comic for a while, if nothing else).
I hate to say it, but I was almost hoping the game mentioned last comic to be a segue into another alternative comic from Jeph like Alice Grove LOL