Los Angeles Lakers vs. Phoenix Suns

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Everybody downtown is wearing green for reasons entirely unrelated to basketball, which makes the walk to the arena on the seventeenth of March one of the stranger ones of the year. The bars along Figueroa have been going since lunchtime, the plaza is louder than a Wednesday has any right to be, and the building ends up with a crowd that is in a conspicuously better mood than the fixture warrants. Phoenix is a division opponent, which at this point in March means the standings are doing real work. The practical advice is to arrive earlier than usual and park further out than usual, because the surrounding streets on this particular night do not behave the way they do on any other Wednesday. Come for the one where the city is already celebrating something else. The other thing to know is that the trains run later than usual on the seventeenth, which makes leaving the car at home a genuinely better plan than normal.