LOS ANGELES — This was the first step for a city whose own mayor described it as “broken” just a few days earlier. And the fact is, Eric Garcetti really wasn’t falling back on hyperbole. All week, this city of 503 square miles has felt like the world’s largest open-air funeral parlor, its citizens deep in mourning, profoundly grieving nine of their own who’d died in a helicopter crash last Sunday.

Only one of them was famous, but Kobe Bryant’s reach and his personality were so great that every conversation, every talk-radio bit, almost every segment of the local news on TV has been about him, and his basketball legacy, and his family, and his daughter, Gianna, who perished alongside him in the hills of Calabasas.

Friday night, for the first time since the death of one of their cornerstone alumni, the Lakers opened the doors at Staples Center to play a basketball game. Portland was the opponent and though the Blazers’ roster features Carmelo Anthony — one of Bryant’s closest friends — Anthony was still too distraught to even be in the building.

“This pain is almost unbearable, Champ,” the ex-Knicks star had written on an Instagram post a few days ago, in which he also revealed, “YOU just called me and told me you were coming to the game Friday night and that you were proud of me and regardless of anything stay true to myself and STAYME7O.”

Everyone is dealing with this in their own ways. Early Friday, the Lakers draped yellow Kobe jerseys — 8 and 24 with equal representation — on each of Staples Center’s 19,068 seats.

On Thursday, the Clippers had played the first basketball game in this building since the crash. Usually, the Clippers keep the retired Lakers jerseys that crowd the arena’s rafters shrouded with a cloth covering, but this time they kept Kobe’s two retired numbers visible and shone a spotlight on them the whole game. In a pregame address, Clippers star Paul George echoed Garcetti’s sad civic description.

“Our city is suffering,” he’d said. “Four days ago, in Calabasas, nine lives were lost, leaving a gaping hole in the heart of Los Angeles.”

It is right and it is good that George was only the latest to honor the other folks who were in that helicopter Sunday morning alongside the 41-year-old Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter — pilot Ara Zobayan, 50; John Altobelli, 56; Keri Altobelli, 46; Alyssa Altobelli, 13; Christina Mauser, 38; Sarah Chester, 45; and Payton Chester, 13.

But for these two days at Staples Center, anyway, it was Bryant embedded in the tear ducts and the wounded hearts of the faithful who kept coming to the LA Live Plaza (Thursday’s guests included Clippers coach Doc Rivers and Sacramento coach Luke Walton, a former teammate of Bryant’s). Friday, police actually had to formally plead with the public to stay away from the ongoing vigil if they weren’t ticket holders to the game; for fear of crowd-control issues the Lakers decided not to show the pregame Kobe tribute on screens in the plaza.

It is Kobe who was the inspiration for the new tattoo that both LeBron James and Anthony Davis were sporting at Thursday’s practice and Friday’s shootaround of a black mamba, which inspired Bryant’s nickname. The Lakers’ coaches were planning on wearing Kobe’s signature Nike shoe, “Big Stage/Parades,” part of the Kobe 5 series he wore in 2010 while winning the last of his five titles with the Lakers.

Friday night was a necessary step in the healing, regardless of the final score, because it seemed to channel so much of Kobe Bryant’s essence: he, as much as anyone, would understand that life goes on even in the midst of sorrow and pain. By Friday, the Lakers seemed to have redoubled their energies to honor Kobe in the best way possible, by winning a 17th NBA championship, which would tie the hated Celtics for most ever.

Soon enough there will come another day, a public memorial, maybe at Staples, maybe at some place more befitting Kobe’s place as an essential LA icon — Dodger Stadium, the LA Coliseum, the Rose Bowl.

“This will not be just about a man who was a basketball player,” Garcetti said. “This is about a father, this is about a leader, this is about a filmmaker, this is about an artist, this is about somebody who was so much more than just who he was on the court.”

The emotional thousands who packed Staples Center Friday night echoed every syllable of that sentiment.