St. Louis ? This morning’s question, sports fans, is about Kirk Hinrich, the Kansas University basketball player who made the most astonishing comeback since Lazarus on Saturday night.

Here’s the question: How in the heck did Hinrich, designated as courtkill on Thursday night, not only play against Stanford, but earn player-of-the game honors from CBS-TV?

Choose from among these answers:

a) Hinrich is, as many have suspected, really Harry Potter and possesses a wizard’s magic.

b) KU coach Roy Williams made a pact with Mephistopheles, vowing to make yearly hegiras to the Mississippi River and deposit saliva.

c) Kansas team doctor Larry Magee performed the modern-miracle, ankle-saving Hinrich Maneuver.

d) Williams’ wife Wanda’s middle name is Lourdes.

Well, of course, none of the above is a correct answer because Kirk Hinrich is merely flesh and blood and unaffected by superstition, witchcraft, voodoo or whatever.

At the same time, though, Hinrich isn’t your average hunk of flesh and blood. I mean, how many people have a heart the size of a basketball?

“I know Kirk,” Stanford’s Casey Jacobsen said after the Cardinal’s 86-63 humbling in the Edward Jones Dome, “and I knew he would play. I knew he’d try to play and he played tough, man. A guy with one leg played with more heart than anyone out there.”

Hinrich played 21 minutes, scored 15 points, made eight assists and, in one of the great ironies of sports, the Jayhawks didn’t really need him.

Hinrich wasn’t on the floor during the first 4:14 when the Jayhawks devoured the Cardinal like a bunch of crazed barracudas during a 15-0 blitz. When Hinrich came in  to the uproarious approval of probably around 15,000 KU fans in The Ed  the Jayhawks were ahead 20-6 and the tone had been established. Hinrich merely reinforced it with his Tasmanian Devil approach to the game.

This guy has a bum ankle??? Goodness, it makes you wonder if Hinrich could play even if he had a broken leg. Heck, maybe Hinrich should be anointed the patron saint of want-to.

“A little bit of it was the medical part,” KU coach Williams said, “but most of it was his want-to.”

Actually, when Williams says it, want-to sounds like wahnt-to. However you say it, though, what Hinrich has everybody wahnts.

Still, because of Hinrich, most people missed the forest because of the tree. No basketball player has ever won a game single-handed, not even Hinrich. No, Kansas won Saturday night because the players were sick and tired of hearing they were going to finish the season like a blaze of old tires instead of in a blaze of glory.

Nick Collison, who had been impersonated in Thursday night’s NCAA opener against Holy Cross by some butterfingered buffoon, erupted for 17 points and 13 rebounds. That’s vintage Collison.

Afterward, Collison said he had been motivated when Bill Mayer, a Journal-World columnist who has been writing about KU basketball since 1950, penned that Collison takes disappearing potion in big games.

What Mayer wrote was that IF Collison continues to take disappearing potion, the Jayhawks will be in trouble. And as Edith Ann always says: “That’s the truth.”

When Collison and Hinrich and Drew Gooden and Jeff Boschee and Aaron Miles and everybody else wearing a KU uniform play like they did on Saturday night, they are college basketball’s version of sliced bread. They are the greatest thing since.

“I hope Kansas wins it all,” Stanford coach Mike Montgomery said. “No one deserves it more than Roy Williams. I don’t really understand people questioning a 30-3 team. That’s ludicrous to me.”

No more questions.