Item: Kansas University drops from the top to No. 5 in the Associated Press men’s basketball poll.

Reaction: Break out the party hats. Crank up the music. Somebody buy doughnuts. It’s time to celebrate.

If this were March, a five-slot drop in the poll would be meaningful. But this is December, and the polls mean about as much as the New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucuses.

No coach in America wants to be ranked No. 1 in December. All it means is you’re a sitting duck, or a sitting mythical bird of the Kaw, as the Jayhawks were Saturday in Anaheim, Calif., when they quacked their way to a 64-58 loss to a Stanford team that couldn’t hit the lake from a rowboat.

Stanford played way over its head — as teams normally do when they have the adrenaline rush of the opportunity to knock the king off the hill. Or as Stanford guard Matt Lottich said afterward: “This was really cool. You don’t get to play the No. 1 team every day.”

There is no upside to being ranked No. 1 before Christmas. All the top spot does is lull players into thinking they need do no more than set foot on the floor and the foe will swoon under the scepter of their invincibility.

In other words, if Florida — the newly anointed No. 1 — doesn’t struggle Wednesday night against Maryland, then Gators coach Billy Donovan deserves to be named December Coach of the Year.

Kansas wasn’t the first No. 1 to fall. UConn began the season as the cream of the poll voters’ crop before Georgia Tech humbled the Huskies in the semifinals of the Preseason NIT at Madison Garden.

Not that anyone who counts UConn among their beloved should be concerned. As Kansas fans know, one of the teams that lost in the semis of last year’s Preseason NIT wound up in the NCAA championship game about four months later.

“Lots of teams are going through crap right now,” KU coach Bill Self said after the Stanford defeat. “But as the season goes on there’ll be less of that stuff going on.”

I guess the C-word is as good as any to describe what commonly occurs in college basketball in December. That’s a word Roy Williams often used as his strongest epithet … until he let his guard down last March and used the more pungent and less acceptable S-word.

Most of the “crap” Kansas is going through right now can be blamed on its inability to force opponents to abandon zone defenses, primarily by drilling uncontested three-point goals. Aaron Miles, J.R. Giddens and Jeff Hawkins just weren’t hitting against Stanford.

All it would have taken was one of those perimeter players to catch fire, but they were as cold as the ice used by the NHL Mighty Ducks, the primary tenant of the Anaheim arena.

Kansas has one other three-point shooter of note in junior Michael Lee, but he is on the shelf for at least another month because of a broken collarbone suffered in practice a couple of weeks ago.

Lee is the Jayhawks’ best three-point shooter with a career average of 50 percent from behind the arc. Granted, he hasn’t attempted a fusillade of threes during his career — a few more than 50 — and he was off to a middling 3-for-11 start before going down, but the whole is always equal to the sum of its parts and Lee may have been the piece the Jayhawks needed to complete the puzzle.

With Lee sidelined, one option may be to rotate Wayne Simien into the backcourt more often. The 6-foot-9 Simien is the best shooting big man the Jayhawks have had since Raef LaFrentz and Simien might be more valuable outside. Gosh knows he isn’t doing much damage inside with those zones collapsing on him like tents after the last circus act.

For that matter, freshman David Padgett might be worthy of more long-range shot attempts, too.

When there’s a hole in the dike, you either use everything at your disposal to plug it or you start looking for flotation devices.