WE HAVE BEEN THIS ROUT BEFORE.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

In baseball, the Giants and A's played the Bay Bridge Series, the Yankees and Mets played the Subway Series, and the Dodgers and Angels imagine the Freeway Series. In basketball, meanwhile, the Lakers and Clippers settle for the Hallway Series, a battle for the hearts and minds of Staples Center, where the home locker rooms of Los Angeles' teams are separated by no more than 20 yards of concrete corridor.

Wednesday night, it was the third meeting of four between L.A. and L.A., and the plot was more twisted than ever as the ``host'' Clippers beat the Lakers for the first time this season, 95-90.

There was the consistent, predictable, reliable team - and then there were the Lakers. There was the team that too often plays like a bunch of moody kids - and then there were the Clippers. There was the team that knows where it's going and likes it - and then there were the Lakers. There was the team with something to prove - and then there were the Clippers.

Usually, these civic wars are about the Clippers' futile attempts to win respect from their own fan base. This time, it was about the Lakers' futile attempt to win back respect from their own fan base.

The night before, a funny thing happened in the Staples stands as the Lakers were getting blown out of their own gym by Denver in their most embarrassing performance of the season. The funny thing is that nothing happened in the stands.

The crowd didn't jump up in outrage as it watched the Lakers go through the motions on offense, where it tossed the ball to the just-returned Shaquille O'Neal and then watched him, and on defense, where it allowed Denver to shoot 56.5 percent.

The crowd didn't stamp its feet in despair that the two-time NBA champions were losing to a last-place team for the fifth time this season.

The crowd seemed more numb than surprised.

It just sat there, quiet but complacent, as the Lakers' too-little, too-late rally flattened out and Denver won by 16.

Said Nick Van Exel, the Lakers-turned-Nuggets guard: ``It just didn't feel right, the mood (Tuesday).... The crowd wasn't as hyped, and I just had a good feeling at the beginning of the game. (The fans) just didn't have a chance to get it going all night.''

I'm guessing that if that Denver-Lakers game had been played a month ago, at the start of this string of losses to fired-up cellar-dwellers, the fans would have been screaming bloody murder.

By now, the crowd shrugs off these half-hearted efforts, complacent as the players and coaches. The prevailing attitude is: Hey, it's just the Lakers being the Lakers. We saw them do this during the last regular season. They got serious when it mattered and they'll do it again.

It says here that Lakers fans should be upset about the team's inconsistency. And it says here the team should be insulted by its fans' low expectations.

Too often, the Lakers act as if they're in the middle of an 82-game preseason, as if those people at courtside are paying hundreds of dollars to monitor the pre-playoff calisthenics.

Never one to worry, Phil Jackson called the Denver game an ``adjustment period'' following Shaq's return from a three-game suspension, though the head coach didn't ignore the fact the Lakers' ``intensity (was) at bay.''

That adjustment period must have stretched into the Clippers game.

``I think Staples is a great place for the people of L.A. to meet and greet each other and have a nice time and talk with each other,'' Jackson said with a comic twinkle in his glasses when he was asked about Tuesday's crowd reaction. ``And if people yell, they might not be able to converse with each other. The crowd was here to be entertained last night, not to encourage our basketball team.

``And that's OK. I mean, we're the ones who are supposed to provide that kind of spark to the team. It was not a partisan crowd that came here to say, `This team has to win and we're going to support it.' ''

Support this team, or boo this team. If you love this team, try to look surprised when it stinks.