It made me think of eccentric England spinner Phil Tufnell when, after a 1993 tour of India without batsman David Gower (another time the one-person-doesn't-make-a-team philosophy proved misplaced), England lost the series 3-0. Asked for his thoughts, Tufnell famously said: "Done the elephant, done the poverty, might as well go home".
The stiff upper lip thing is all the Brits can do over Vunipola - they certainly can't say what my old club coach, former All Black prop "Snow" White, used to when he wasn't happy with our midweek preparation: "Might as well go down the road and have a milkshake."
Even former All Black captain Sean Fitzpatrick has been stiff-upper-lipping, saying the Lions pack will still test the All Blacks without the big No. 8.
He's right but for a more revealing analysis of Vunipola's loss, here's what former England centre Will Greenwood told Sky Sports News about him: "His ball-playing ability is second to none in that back row. You kick long to him, he comes back and he either charges through five or six people or, as he did in the semifinal of the European Cup, he catches and fizzes 20-yard passes off his left or his right.
"Brilliant at the base and immensely fit, considering the size of the man - and thinking surely he can't get around. Even when he was exhausted, and now we find out playing with one arm against Exeter [for Saracens], he was potentially the man of the match in that game; he could have been man of the match in potentially every game he has played in the past two years."
Vunipola was the most obvious of only about five world-class players - certainly no more than six - in the Lions party of 41; "world-class" meaning they would be seriously considered for inclusion in a 23-man World squad.
There's this thing in rugby called the gain line. The idea is to get over it when carrying the ball - it unsettles the defence, gives your teammates forward momentum and creates space. Vunipola doesn't just get over the gain line, he leaves it broken and weeping in the corner.
It's possible to lionise such players over-much; we don't want to fall into the superior-Englishman trap of dismissing whole countries, cultures and teams from a supposedly loftier (if not entirely humourless) perspective, like playwright Alan Bennett's bon mot on Sweden: "...where they commit suicide and the King rides a bicycle."
The Lions will still be strong - but Vunipola's absence will be living in the heads of players and coaches; losing him is like buying a four-wheel-drive and discovering someone's nicked the wheels.
He is an ideal forward for the rumbly, close-quarters, grinding stuff the Lions are likely to play against the All Blacks, giving them that go-forward with his ability to make many carries and make most of them count.
His absence also underlines the almost impossible task facing the Lions. Not just the 2017 version but any Lions teams from now on, thanks to rugby's inability to cook up a global season and/or solve the highly inconvenient issue of the northern hemisphere winter occurring in our summer and vice versa.
Before they start, the touring team are tired. In the professional era, northern hemisphere players are involved in what seems like more games than the NBA, driven hard by their clubs, unprotected by their international masters. Lions coaches live in a state of constant anxiety as the northern season gets to the sharp end.
Warren Gatland has been lucky thus far with injuries but there's no hiding from the fact his team have played through a daunting season; they face a horror schedule here and, at the end of all that, they get to face the world's best team.
Still and all, a Lions victory is possible even if "Lions victory" is one of those examples of joined words that don't quite go together like (with apologies to John Oliver) "President Trump", "English coffee", "jumbo shrimp" and "happy enema".
