Why do we write onload() function before we write send() in XMLHttpRequest

I am new to XMLHttpRequest. I dont understand why do we write onload() function before send() function. onload() function process the response what we receive and send() function sends a request to server. So onload() has to be written after send() function as per my understanding. Can somebody help to understand this.

var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(),
  method = 'GET',
  url = 'https://developer.mozilla.org/';

xmlhttp.open(method, url, true);
xmlhttp.onload = function () {
  // Do something with the retrieved data
};
xmlhttp.send();