I didn’t really plan to watch the Lakers in their season-opener on Christmas Day.

The game didn’t start until 2:30 p.m. in Los Angeles (which was early December 26 here in the UAE), and I prefer my sports-from-the-other-side-of-the-world to end about that time. Not start.

But the night kinda dragged on, and when I got to 2 a.m. or so I decided to give the Lakers a look. Just a few minutes, watch the Chicago Bulls jump to a big lead, then get some sleep.

If you saw the game, you know that plan was doomed. Rather like this Lakers season.

It was hard to imagine the Lakers winning this one. Kobe Bryant with another injury (a torn ligament in his right wrist) that he will drag around all season … a suddenly ancient lineup, with Derek Fisher (how is this possible?) still the starting point guard, and Metta World Peace (nee Ron Artest) having lost all his athleticism in about a year, and Pau Gasol having not looked like much since he stunk up the playoffs last spring, and Lamar Odom gone, and career mediocrity Josh McRoberts starting in place of the suspended Andrew Bynum …

I expected the worst, but then the Lakers ran out to a little lead, and I was hooked. As the clock rotated through 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. … I watched them hang around for a half, go neck-and-neck through the third quarter, take an 11-point lead in the fourth quarter … and began to wonder how it is that anyone thinks the Bulls are the only team that can stop LeBron and the Heat.

And then I saw the Lakers cough up the game in the final 2-3 minutes.

It would have been a very nice victory, at home, over a team better than are the current Lakers, playing without Bynum, but when you depend on Josh McRoberts and World Peace and Steve Blake and Troy Murphy (wait; what?) in the clutch, good things are unlikely to happen.

It was like the Bulls flipped a switch (remember when the Lakers could do that?) and started playing lights-out defense over the second half of the fourth quarter, and the Lakers were smothered. Overwhelmed. Throttled.

Those hustle plays McRoberts and Murphy had been making went away, and Kobe began doing “bad old Kobe” things — playing 1-on-2, casting off high-degreee-of-difficulty shots — and when Luol Deng stole Kobe’s pass while the Lakes were nursing a one-point lead with 20 seconds left … well, it seemed obvious the Bulls would score, and Derrick Rose floated a shot into the basket from about 10 feet.

Kobe tried a 1-on-4 drive to the rim (no, really; and you knew he would) in the final seconds which, of course, failed (Deng blocked it), and there’s a 0-1 start to the season after a game a slightly better team could have (would have) stolen from a Bulls team that stunk for 3.5 quarters.

What concerned me, as a Lakers fan staying up all night in Abu Dhabi, UAE … was Kobe returning to that 2006-07 mode of “I have to do it all myself” — which you would think, at age 33, he would have noticed he can’t actually pull off.

What also concerned me was Pau Gasol not looking remotely like a top-15 kinda of player, as he was last year. At least during the regular season. It’s like something snapped inside his head. He is tentative. He is never assertive. He isn’t shooting with confidence, he never really goes to the rack … he’s supposed to be a semi-superstar, but at the moment he’s barely an adequate NBA starter. We could blame this on the Chris Paul trade that would have sent him to Houston, and how it screwed with his mind, but he was awful in the playoffs last season, too, and how do we explain that?

Gasol must come around to give the Lakers a chance at the playoffs — and make him an attractive enough trade chip that the Lakers can offer him to Orlando, along with Andrew Bynum, for Dwight Howard.

That is my other realization, out of that 88-87 frustration fest. The Lakers have to get Dwight Howard or they’re about to go into some rebuilding process that probably will outlast Kobe’s career.  I would like to think the Lakers are plotting this trade every minute of every day, because they must get Dwight Howard. They have to.

If not, a year from now I most certainly will not be staying up till 5 a.m. to watch them lose.