I’m a National League fan. Baseball is like that. You have a strong preference for one league or the other. If you are any kind of fan at all.

So I was pulling for the National League to win an All-Star Game for the first time since 1996 (!) tonight. For most of the night I thought the NL was destined to win.

Didn’t happen. But it was a great game. All 15 innings of it. Right up until the winning run scored, at 1:37 a.m. EDT — before a 60 percent empty Yankee Stadium.

The game had just about everything. A couple of home runs. A classically manufactured run by the NL in the top of the eighth (stolen base, throwing error, sac fly, close play at plate) to give the NL a 3-2 lead. Some outstanding pitching. Seven stolen bases. And tons of outstanding, clutch defense, especially by the National League.

There was a nerve-racking stretch in the 10th and 11th innings when the NL recorded three outs at home plate in a span of five outs. Two forces with the bases loaded in the 10th, and then a great catch-throw-tag at home plate in the 11th, when Nate McLouth threw out Dioner Navarro trying to score from second, a play made possible by catcher Russell Martin’s outstanding short-hop catch and tag — while partially blocking the plate with his extended left leg.

Back to the 10th. The NL escaped a bases-loaded, no-outs jam (completed by Miguel Tejada’s clutch charge-and-off-balance throw to first to nip Justin Morneau). And, in the process, saved Dan Uggla from “Midsummer Classic goat” status.

Uggla made consecutive errors on ground balls to second to open the inning — after hitting into a double play (with runners at first and third) to end the top of the inning. Had the NL lost in that inning it might have been the sort of 1-2-3 gaffes-you’re-out implosion that followed Uggla around for the rest of his career. It was Buckneresque — except Bill Buckner’s 1986 World Series error was one destructive play, not three.

In the 11th the NL escaped a first-and-second with one out, thanks to Martin’s tag at the plate, and then survived a second-and-third with two outs.

And in the 12th, the American League had a leadoff double but didn’t score, as Aaron Cook of the NL escaped with three high-wire shutout innings pitched.

By then it just seemed as if the National League was supposed to win. How could they come so close to defeat so many times and not win? Especially with that curious extra-inning statistic in play — the NL was unbeaten (9-0-1) in 10 extra-inning games.

Then the NL offense went dead, and the game kept pushing into the night. Then the morning. And that produced a tasty subplot.

Would one of the teams run out of pitchers and force another tie? Like the one in 2002, when both teams ran out of pitching after 11 innings? Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, after declaring that ’02 game a 7-7 tie, said, “This will never happen again.”

But it came very close. Each team used its last pitcher in the 15th (Scott Kazmir for the AL, Brad Lidge for the NL), and each man could have gone maybe one more inning. Then Selig would have to explain how a tie never happening again had happened again — just six years later.

Lidge and the American League hitters saved Bud. The Americans finally broke through in the bottom of the 15th against Lidge — who has some history of choking in big games. Two basehits and a walk loaded the bases, and Michael Young’s fly ball to right (originally described as a “pop” by Fox announcer Joe Buck) was just deep enough to get Morneau home from third ahead of Corey Hart’s fairly tepid throw.

Sigh. NL loses again. In 15 innings and 4 hours, 50 minutes.

But it was fun. Quite. I’m not sure I’ve watched so much of any All-Star Game in … years. For that matter, I don’t remember the last time I watched that much of a big-league game that didn’t involve the Dodgers or Angels. Because it was compelling from about the seventh inning on.

Everything was there. Except the right team winning.