THE DAY AFTER

Stepping around a bonfire along a trash-strewn street near Staples Center late Monday night, I was passed by a laughing kid in a Laker jersey.

“What’s he doing out here?” the kid said in my direction while jogging down the road toward another target.

I couldn’t tell him then, so I want to tell him now.

I was walking to my car after watching the Lakers win a world championship, moron.

I was soaking in the honking horns, the flapping flags, the little girls sticking their index fingers out the back windows of cars that literally swayed with joy, you fool.

You tried, creep, but you couldn’t stop me, couldn’t stop the city, couldn’t kill the moment.

The big news Monday was that the Lakers won.

The more important news was that you idiots lost.

Desperately trying to steal a show that belonged to the city’s basketball team, a relatively small group of vandals did about as well as the Clippers.

Certainly, this is not to minimize the damage of more than half a dozen burned cars and several broken windows.

Obviously, it is not in a city’s best interest to have a postgame parade following a route through blazing garbage.

Our hearts and anger are with those who suffered losses in isolated looting.

But the dignified joy expressed by the millions of others in our town was not diminished.

After proving they were more powerful than 28 other NBA teams, the Lakers then showed they were also stronger than a bunch of punks.

In a coat and tie and press badge, rolling my computer along behind me like some lost nerd looking for LAX, I walked 12 blocks to my car Monday night.

I was once turned back by a striding line of policemen. Twice I was detoured by road closures. The bonfires turned up the heat, the low-flying helicopters turned up the volume.

But not once did I feel in any sort of danger.

Their strange chants--they would cry, “Go, Lakers!” before kicking up a pile of fast-food bags--were drowned out by the honking and cheering of the good folks who drove around them.

Their silly little two-fingered waves were overshadowed by passersby flapping the floppy foam finger No. 1.

It was pitiable, perhaps, that most of the youths were fat and slow but still wore Laker jerseys.

But dangerous?

My fears were calmed the moment I saw the punks surrounding and beating the tar out of a . . . newspaper box?

How brave. And to think, it wasn’t even an L.A. Times box! Guess they would rather pick on some poor weekly.

It was like watching a couple of drunks rolling around on the ground at a picnic, knocking over a couple of chairs, humiliating only themselves.

The news channels did their best to turn them into heroes, but even then, the losers were losers. Especially then.

Judging from the string of mono-syllabic and grammatically fractured answers offered during the interviews, this city was apparently being rampaged by a bunch of preschoolers.

They didn’t even fool the out-of-town media, which loves our city’s troubles the way Kobe Bryant loves Reggie Miller.

Watching the events unfold on television while waiting in the Staples Center press room, the reaction was unusual and refreshing.

They shrugged.

“What is it, a couple of cars?” asked one writer.

“This is a riot?” asked another.

Of course it wasn’t. The city was stronger. The Lakers were bigger.

The Staples Center people--thinking they were being good citizens by showing the game on the big screen TV outside--surely will be smarter next time.

I will not remember Monday night for what happened on a couple of downtown blocks, but for what happened in a city’s heart.

I will remember it not for bright orange flames, but for multicolored embraces.

I will remember it not for the smell of burning rubber, but for the aroma of perfume on champagne on cigar smoke.

The face still staring at me today is not some vacant-eyed sheep, but a red-eyed Shaquille O’Neal.

At 2:53 a.m. Tuesday, I received an e-mail. It was from a fan who couldn’t wait to wear his O’Neal jersey to places where he had previously been ridiculed.

At 6:07 a.m., I received an e-mail from a fan who wondered what Wilt Chamberlain was thinking.

At 7:22 a.m., I received an e-mail from a fan who was thinking about Monday night’s mix of children in Laker clothes and old men in Laker caps.

At 9:30 a.m., I stepped outside and spotted two Laker-shirted maintenance men slapping hands.

Yes, there was violence Monday. The Lakers wiped out the Indiana Pacers.

Yes, there was chaos. Staples Center was hit with a confetti snowstorm.

Yes, there was a fire, in the spirit of a city whose dramatically restored bond could not be broken by a relatively few jealous jerks.

Long may it burn.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.