Wayne Newton performs before the start of the NBA All-Star game. The showcase was Sunday in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas ? Oh yeah, the game.

Happily, in all the revelry that surrounded the NBA’s breakthrough visit to this city of our dreams and nightmares, they remembered to play it.

The West won, for what that’s worth. As Sacramento Kings and Palms Casino co-owner Gavin Maloof, whose family lobbied the other casinos to take it off their boards, noted beforehand:

“If you bet the NBA All-Star Game, you might as well get a life.”

The All-Star Game is now just the final act of All-Star Weekend, and in the case of this glitz-covered-partied-out-traffic-snarled weekend, hardly the most memorable part.

It was wall-to-wall Vegas, starting with a welcome by Siegfried and Roy (with subtitles on the scoreboard TV screen because of their German accents), segueing into Wayne Newton with the Folies Bergere showgirls in sequins and headdresses doing “Viva Las Vegas,” “Orange Blossom Special” and “Danke Schoen.”

By then, the pregame show was nearing a half-hour, including a video tribute by Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade to “our partners,” reading off a list of 19 corporate sponsors from Adidas to T-Mobile. They even included Spalding, maker of that notorious killer basketball.

Of course, if you want a lot of electricity in an arena full of corporate partners, they might need to hire someone to cheer for them.

Usually, you have 10,000 actual fans, mostly season-ticket holders of the home team. In the absence of a home team, this game proceeded amid a respectful silence.

Not that it was dull, but remember when everyone was concerned about the dunk contest?

These days the dunk contest (Boston’s Gerald Green vaulting over New York’s Nate Robinson to win) is better than the game.

On the other hand, you have to love a game that ends with videos of Bryant, James, Wade, Shaquille O’Neal, Yao Ming, Steve Nash, et. al, in huge Elvis Impersonator wigs, trying to sing “Viva Las Vegas.”

The weekend was really about being here and the possibility of returning. Suggesting things are looking good for putting a team here, Commissioner David Stern said Mayor Oscar Goodman will make a formal proposal this spring.

Stern, who had been insisting that the casinos would have to stop taking bets on NBA games, said it’s now “for the owners to decide.”

To anyone who knows how the NBA works, this meant: “OK, I’ve got that settled, what’s next?”

Just being here seemed to erase four bumpy months (the basketball controversy, the fight, the incidents outside clubs, the John Amaechi revelations, the Tim Hardaway rebuttal.)

Stern’s Saturday news conference was one of the least eventful on record, even if Stern, perhaps defensive about giving up the high moral ground on the gambling issue, let his trademark petulance out for a romp.

In a normal news conference, the media members ask questions and the commissioner answers them. In the NBA, the media ask questions and Stern instructs them in their responsibilities.

It was a logistical nightmare but if you like crowds, it was great. All-Star Saturday, normally the league’s contribution to trash sports, was enlivened not just by the dunk contest but the Charles Barkley-Dick Bavetta race.

Barkley told the 67-year-old Bavetta he respected old people “because I want to be one one day.”

Said TNT’s Ernie Johnson: “Then maybe you’d shouldn’t do this tonight.”