Lakers Can’t Feel Super After This Loss

Even supermen get the blues.

Don’t you just hate it when you find a phone booth, change clothes, run out to fight crime ... and find you still don’t have your super powers?

Picture your three-time defending champion Lakers, who have grown used to courting disaster for months at a time, only to change identities in the spring, nab any miscreants in their way by the collar and fly them off to face justice.

That was up to Thursday night, anyway, when the Lakers emerged in all their caped glory but the Minnesota Timberwolves didn’t seem to notice, running up a 13-point lead, blowing it at the end of regulation, losing Kevin Garnett on fouls early in the overtime and winning anyway, 114-110.

Oh no, is this the one where Lex Luther makes Superman go into that booth and turns him into an ordinary mortal?

Actually, it’s the one in which Garnett helps Rasho Nesterovic double-team O’Neal, turning the Laker center with the Superman logo on his biceps (and on the grill of his Escalade and etched into the glass on the front door of his house) into a man of flesh and blood.

O’Neal, caught in a Tokyo subway crush in the lane, missed 12 of his first 18 shots and finished 28 points. With Kobe Bryant’s 30, that made 58, two fewer than the new tandem in town, 60, with Garnett getting 33 and Troy Hudson 27.

The Timberwolves started the night at what amounted to their zenith in seven postseasons. They have never led a series and even with the first two at home, no one was sure they’d ever tie this one back up after they lost the opener.

This may be why Garnett embraced their Game 2 turnaround with such blood-curdling sincerity, naming the organs the Lakers would have to rip out to beat them, one by one, suggesting: a) what a ferocious competitor he is and b), he may be watching too many violent movies.

Now, having dented the Laker aura, the Timberwolves were wondering what else might be possible.

“I think it helps that we did win here earlier this year,” Coach Flip Saunders said before the game, “but there’s no question, any time you go play on the road, you have to overcome the initial jolt of the energy in the arena with the crowd, the energy that their players are going to get off playing at home. And so you have to be able to overcome that....

“We’ve really talked more about what we have to do. Our players have been around long enough, they know the history of the Lakers and what they do and how they play and there’s a reason they won a championship for three straight years. I don’t think that something I really have to talk about.

“We just said, ‘You know what? We’re going to get over that. We’re going to play our game, how we need to play.’ We know the recipe that we’ve got to use in order to win. It’s whether we can get the same mixture we had last time, that’s what we’re going to find out.”

There was a jolt all right, but just a little one, the Lakers jumping to a 9-4 lead, before Saunders called a timeout ... and the Timberwolves came out of it with a 14-7 run to take the lead they maintained the rest of the half.

More to the point, Minnesota had a hook into O’Neal, with the ultimate spiderman, Garnett, dropping back to double-team along with Nesterovic.

Trying to draw Garnett away, Laker Coach Phil Jackson inserted Robert Horry into the starting lineup for Mark Madsen, but for Horry, the miracle-worker of so many postseasons, this one hasn’t started yet.

He’s in a shooting slump that has spread to the rest of his game, as he demonstrated by turning the ball over three times by halftime, including one pass he threw off the yellow pipes behind the basket.

The Timberwolves led by as many as nine in the first half and 13 in the third quarter before the Lakers clawed their way back into it in the fourth, as O’Neal wore the defense out.

The Lakers even went ahead, 89-87, before the Timberwolves scored the next eight points, tying it on Wally Szczerbiak’s reverse layup, going ahead on Garnett’s 17-foot jumper, stretching it to 101-96 with 22 seconds left.

Of course, the Lakers then launched their miracle comeback, around the latest of Bryant’s improbable four-point plays.

Early in the overtime, Garnett fouled out, which should have been like pulling the plug on the hot air ballon.

Szczerbiak, who is always begging for the ball, then tried to take over but that didn’t work out.

With the score 105-105, Szczerbiak became entangled with Rick Fox on a cut. Fox was called for the foul ... but Szczerbiak barked at one of the referees with sufficient ardor to draw a technical foul, which Bryant converted, giving the Lakers the lead.

But the Timberwolves kept coming back. Now it’s the Lakers’ turn.