Don't write, call, e-mail, text or Twitter. I understand how nauseous this series is making you, purple-and-golders.

But let's face it folks, you're on the wrong side of a great story. The Lakers have helped turn the Rockets into the darlings of the NBA playoffs.

Yep, those tenacious underdogs from Houston are forging on against all odds, matching the top-seeded Lakers win for win, while their two biggest stars, long gone Tracy McGrady and recently gone Yao Ming, dress for games in stylish street clothes.

That's the national perspective. On the Lakers' side, the Rockets are just a horror movie.

Ahhh, they're alive! They were buried last week, and here they come again!

The Houston Zombies, fresh from the graveyard, marching ominously toward Game 7 on Sunday at Staples Center, where the golden-clad warrior, Kobe Bryant, and his fellow good guys will finally hand them their death certificates.

Good guys? Maybe around here, but across the country, the Lakers are just like the Yankees, the Celtics and Notre Dame - to name a few traditional powers who've felt the wrath of the anti-big dog crowd.

At this point, even if the Lakers do what everyone expects and beat Houston, the Rockets will be nobler in defeat than the advancing Lakers .

Oh well, that's the way it goes when you're an overwhelming favorite and you've been taking your sweet, somewhat lazy time finishing off a less-talented bunch.

It especially plays into stereotype when you're a Southland team, playing in a country in which almost every non-Los Angeles sports fan worth a bag of peanuts has chanted "Beat LA!" at one time or another.

And it's even more of a rush to the Rockets' bandwagon because this Lakers team is particularly unsympathetic outside LA. Its two "faces," Bryant and Coach Phil Jackson, elicit zippo from the warm-and-fuzzy department.

Bryant's 13 seasons have turned him into the franchise's hood ornament. It's impossible to separate the team from Kobe, Kobe from the team. They are melded.

He is the NBA's most polarizing player, the one most likely to hear a few "MVP!" chants from one side of an out-of-town arena, and a cacophony of derisive yells from the other. He's zealously admired for his skills, clutch play and unmatched will to win, and equally perceived as too cocky and as coldly detached as an assassin.

For good measure, twice in this series he's managed to look like a bully against longtime NBA bad boy Ron Artest, drawing punishment for one elbow thrown backward and one forward.

Then there's Jackson, widely admired in LA for his calming presence and wit. Outside of LA, he looks like a guy extraordinarily pleased with himself, sometimes for no apparent reason. Plus he's never met a city or fan base outside his own place of business that he didn't like to razz.

He's always been more comfortable needling whatever you got - league officials, refs, the networks, reporters and even his own players - than passing out gratuitous niceties, another trait that is amusing here but doesn't play well in Peoria.

Fortunately for the Lakers , this is Basketball, not "American Idol," so their lack of charm won't get them eliminated by popular vote Sunday.

Staples, no doubt, will be a noisy madhouse, ground zero for regional Lakers fanaticism, which Kobe and pals should milk for all its worth.

In this world, it's all the charity they'll get.

Reach Gregg Patton at 951-368-9597 or gpatton@PE.com