No, they weren’t being chased by irate Kansas fans.

The two had flights to catch or so it was said. Then again, maybe they just weren’t taking any chances. One was Ed Hightower who has been around long enough he worked KU’s 1988 NCAA championship game against Oklahoma, for instance to know that a hasty departure in the wake of a game with 51 fouls is judicious.

How Kansas won this one with Hightower and company tooting whistles in the Jayhawks’ ears willy-nilly will go down in history as one of the great mysteries of the game Dr. Naismith invented more than a century ago.

Teams DON’T win when the other team shoots 29 more free throws. Moreover, throw in 22 turnovers and, well, KU coach Roy Williams opined he would have expected “a 20-point loss. I don’t know if I’ve ever won a game with that much disparity at the free throw line and in turnovers.”

Earl Richardson/Journal-World Photo

Has any coach ever won with such a lopsided disadvantage in those statistics?

Probably. But rarely. Very rarely.

And so we’ll always be left to wonder if Williams, had Kansas faltered at the end, risked censure from the conference office poohbahs by saying something he shouldn’t have said about the zebras.

As it was, Williams still wondered out loud about some of the things he saw.

“It seemed like every marginal call went against us,” he said. “We’d get a blocking call, then it would happen on the other end and it wasn’t called. I’m not complaining about the officiating. The calls just didn’t go our way.”

I’m wondering, too, after looking at the box score, if the Jayhawks didn’t set some kind of obscure NCAA record by having five players finish with four fouls. I sure can’t imagine a team ever having six players with four fouls.

Not that it matters. Williams was a lot unhappier about the turnovers anyway.

“The only thing wrong with our offense is some of our guys left their brains in Lawrence,” he said. “It was stupidity. We had 800 turnovers that weren’t very bright.”

Unfortunately, Kansas’ uncanny ability to overcome all those fouls and turnovers turned the Kenny Gregory homecoming and comeback into a sub-plot.

So often when a player returns to his hometown, he is so eager to perform for the home folk that anxiety overcomes reality and the result is a sub-par outing. Not Gregory, not after he led the Jayhawks with 17 points in his first appearance in nearly three weeks.

“I was surprised he played 32 minutes because his first practice was Thursday,” Williams said. “He only practiced twice.”

Chances are if Gregory’s teammates hadn’t been in foul trouble he wouldn’t have. Gregory, as you may know, seldom suffers foul woes. He has never, in fact, fouled out of a college game. He finished with three infractions Saturday.

Gregory’s return was a plus. Would the Jayhawks have won without him? Probably not. He showed no effects of the leg stress fracture that had turned him into an assistant coach. Kansas probably wouldn’t have won without Luke Axtell, either. Axtell, making his second comeback from ankle woes, had seven points in 13 foul-plagued minutes. Yep, he was one of the five Jayhawks with four fouls.

As usual in basketball, the whole is equal to the sum of its parts and, in this case, the Jayhawks sure needed those extra parts.

I guess, in view of the season, you could say Williams and the Jayhawks received an early Christmas present on Saturday. Or maybe you could just say they all even out over the long haul.

Whatever, the words Williams uttered to Ohio State coach Jim O’Brien afterward rang awfully true.

“I told Jim,” Williams said, “that we were lucky.”

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