Norman, Okla. ? Not that I’m as superstitious as, say, Roy Williams, but when I saw Ed Hightower wearing stripes, I thought I might have seen a harbinger of something good for Kansas University.

Hightower, one of the nation’s most recognizable college basketball officials, doesn’t officiate as much as he used to. In fact, Sunday afternoon marked the first time Hightower, a high school administrator in Illinois, had worked a KU game this season.

Those of you with fairly long memories might recall Hightower was one of the three officials who carried a whistle in the 1988 NCAA championship game, also between Kansas and Oklahoma.

KU won, as you know, 83-79.

Would Hightower’s presence Sunday mean good fortune for the Jayhawks again?

Yeah, right. You saw the game on television, or as much of it as you could stand before the Jayhawks staged their stirring but much-too-late comeback from a 32-point canyon. So much for harbingers. Kansas ran into a haymaker early. A team of NBA All-Stars would have had no chance against Oklahoma in the first half. The Sooners brought their A-plus game. The Jayhawks were C-minus at best early on.

Is Oklahoma that good? No way. Is Kansas that bad? Of course not. OU and KU were ranked Nos. 5 and 6 respectively in the AP poll going in, and KU didn’t win 20 games by using smoke and mirrors.

Still, you have to wonder about the Jayhawks’ timid performance in the first 20 minutes. Clearly frustrated and perhaps intimidated from the outset by OU’s justifiably renowned strangling defense, the Jayhawks started forcing shots and becoming more and more dejected as their shots popped in and out, or off the rim.

Then the Sooners — mainly point guard Quannas White — started drilling guarded three-pointers, and the Jayhawks deflated like the sails of Alinghi and Team New Zealand at the wind-starved America’s Cup races.

Guarded three-pointers are devastating to the guardees, and the Jayhawks were clearly crushed.

Some of the pregame buzz in the media room had centered around a comparison of both teams in the Sunday edition of The Daily Oklahoman by columnist Berry Tramel.

In analyzing the two coaches, Tramel noted how Williams’ all-time record against OU was 17-10 and 6-5 in Lloyd Noble Center. At the same time, Tramel recorded that OU’s Kelvin Sampson was 4-9 lifetime against Kansas and 2-3 against the Jayhawks at home. Also duly pointed out were their career records — Williams 408-98 in 15 years and Sampson 381-226 in 20 years.

All that said, who had the edge? “OU big,” Tramel penned.

OU big??? Huh???

“It was a screw-up,” Tramel told me before Sunday’s tipoff. “It shouldn’t have read that way. It should have been ‘OU slight.'”

OU slight??? Huh???

I hate to accuse Tramel — a writer I’ve known and respected for many years — of provincial journalism, but that’s what his Williams-Sampson comparison looked like to me.

Personally, I’d call it a toss-up. Both Williams and Sampson are upper-echelon coaches. Williams is great because he rebuilt a tradition-rich basketball program and maintained its excellence. Sampson is great because he fashioned a school with a football reputation into a basketball juggernaut.

On this Sunday afternoon, Sampson had the edge in the first half when the Sooners bolted to that 47-26 lead. In the second half, the edge belonged to Williams, because he made sure his players didn’t throw in the sponge.

Bottom line is, Oklahoma was expected to win, had to win to have any chance at the Big 12 Conference regular-season championship and did win because the Sooners played better over the full 40 minutes than the Jayhawks did.