LAWRENCE, Kan. — There was no joy in Mudville. Jared Sullinger didn’t play against Kansas yesterday, and like Casey, a mighty nonconference matchup struck out.

No one on the Ohio State side liked it that Sullinger didn’t play, for reasons that soon became obvious on the scoreboard. The Buckeyes are No. 2 with Sullinger, a leading candidate for national player of the year, and No. ? without him. They are still a strong team, but their chances of winning against a No. 13 Kansas team in Allen Fieldhouse pretty much went from good to gone.

The Jayhawks didn’t like it, either. Beating the Buckeyes without Sullinger is better than losing to them with him. But Kansas had this game in a place where the crowd volume rivals that of a roaring jet engine at 20 feet, an environment where they just might have won anyway. As it is, the Jayhawks’ 78-67 win tasted a little like a swig of soda that has lost its fizz.

OSU coach Thad Matta was cast in the role of Scrooge in this holiday drama. He said that he decided yesterday morning that he didn’t really have a good feel about playing his star, who has been suffering from back spasms.

Sophomore guard Aaron Craft said, “We knew Jared wasn’t going to play, probably at the beginning of the week” — next time, they might want to get their stories straight — but when wasn’t nearly as important as what.

“As I told Coach (Bill) Self before the game as we shook hands, I said ‘Merry Christmas — early,’ ” Matta said.

Well, something like that.

“I don’t think his exact two words were ‘Merry Christmas,’ ” a grinning Self said. “I think there could have been a couple of other words in there, maybe describing the holiday.”

The missing adjectives would have come in handy for Self, too. The Kansas coach knew that his team wasn’t going to get the credit it would have gotten for beating a juggernaut that had the 6-foot-9 Sullinger on the floor. He also knew the Jayhawks probably wouldn’t even get the credit it deserved for beating the good team it did.

Self said, “I don’t think you put an asterisk on the win,” and “I think Ohio State is still a top-10 team without him,” but he obviously knew what a tough sell that was. “We’re not going to apologize for beating Ohio State without Sullinger,” he said. “It’s still a great win for us.”

If it wasn’t exactly a “great” win, it was a good one; the Buckeyes showed a lot of fight for a team that had every reason to be down about the loss of a player so critical to so many facets of its game.

But when you strip away all this extraneous junk, here is what we are left with: Even if Sullinger’s back is close to being better — and it must be because Matta admitted that the Northland High grad would have played if this had been an NCAA Tournament game — the coach probably did the right thing by not playing him.

“I’ll be honest, in my mind I didn’t want to do it,” Matta said. “I got a text from a reporter saying ‘How can you not play him in the biggest game of the year?’ and I don’t think that way. This is one game.

“Nobody hurts more than Jared does. This type of environment is what excites him. But this is one game of 40 or however many we’re going to play, and I just didn’t feel comfortable with it, to be honest, for the long haul.”

He said Sullinger tried to persuade him to let him play, one reason it’s ridiculous that some “haters” Sullinger often re-tweets on Twitter were all over him for not playing. He was clearly disappointed, although he wouldn’t admit it afterward.

“I can’t speak upon that because I didn’t play,” Sullinger said. “I apologize.”

No apology is needed, from Sullinger or Matta.

“I talked to Thad before the game, and from their standpoint, it’s not worth it,” Self said. “They’ve got a chance to win it all, so there’s no reason to try to win this game and risk anything down the road. That was smart by them, if in fact that’s where he’s at.”

It was smart, even if it’s not. Yesterday’s OSU team is not the one the Buckeyes want to take into March.

Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.

bhunter@dispatch.com