Living and working in Southern California for three-plus decades, I am sure I did not adequately appreciate the enormous advantage conferred on those living with a few miles of the Pacific Ocean.

Pacific Standard Time.

Indeed, no time standard is as felicitous when it comes to presenting the day’s sports events as dear old PST … or its now larger brother, PDT (Pacific Daylight Time).

Let me explain.

This returns, of course, to the days when time zones mattered more than they do now, in following global sports. Before the era of the internet and round-the-clock updating of most of the significant news sources.

But before that … from, say, 1995 on back, newspapers were your most complete source for news of the day.

And the day, on the Pacific Coast of North America, ends later than that of the rest of the Lower 48 states.

We need hardly remind that London is eight hours ahead of Los Angeles, Paris and most of Europe nine, or even 10, upon reaching Greece and Turkey.

When working on the Pacific, the sun had rolled across the world by the time we went to press, and we were as complete as we could be.

(It always seemed to me both a cruel and barbarous natural fact that the great East Coast newspapers went to bed without West Coast baseball and basketball scores and boxscores … and that to get them in print involved willing souls who waited around till the wee hours to get the Dodgers box in some later edition of the newspaper, never home-delivered. How could a person live like that?)

In PST, 98 percent of the world that matters — or is populated, anyway — has ended its day when the California newspapers close, and that is so very tidy for an orderly flow of news.

The marvel of PST is reinforced by what comes behind it, on the same day.

Mostly thousands upon thousands of square miles of nothing but ocean.

Hawaii is two hours behind PST, but no one really minds, no big-league franchises being located there. Same for Alaska. Nothing missed.

And then comes the international dateline, with various tiny islands on one side or the other (Samoa being the tail end of “today”, Fiji being among the very first participants in “tomorrow”.)

This, we West Coast newsmen not only could sum up the world, it would remain largely unchanged until noon or later in Australia or Japan — or well into the light of day, in California.

Once in a blue moon we could get in early matches of the Australian Open or perhaps a result out of the America’s Cup — but it happened so rarely as not to be discussed.

I persist in this vein because the UAE is located in a quite awkward position, when it comes to sports times and events.

Most of the year, those of us here are three hours ahead of Britain, two hours ahead of Paris, and anything happening on the other side of the Atlantic will almost never get into print. (When clocks are returned to their “correct” versions, with the demise of “daylight savings time” in Europe and the U.S., we are four hours ahead of England, nine ahead of New York, 12 ahead of L.A.  Bloody awkward.)

So, do we have any consolation?

Well, sure. Anything happening in Australia or the Far East of Asia, will make The National. As will most events around the Indian Ocean and in the eastern half of Russia.

Not that it matters, really. A bit of soccer. Some cricket. A tennis event or two. Nothing major. Literally, nothing major in terms of golf or tennis.

Much of what we care about … happens behind us.

The Champions League, for example.

Nearly every game contested west of European Russia, which is to say nearly all of them, begins at 10:45 p.m. UAE time.

Our normal deadline is 11 p.m.

Which is why our deadline tonight is the latest it can possibly be and still get the newspaper delivered in the morning — 1.15 a.m.

Which means anyone starting an eight-hour shift will report at about 5 p.m. and work through midnight — which is fine for partying but unnatural for work.

It would be far better for print journalism here if the Earth rotated in the opposite direction. We would get everything out of the Americas every day, and most everything out of Europe, too.

Indeed, we would be in the position that Left Coasters find themselves in now. And they would be even worse off than we are. Their events would be the first of “today” … and everything else would be happening later in the same day.

I’m telling you, West Coast sports fans:

You have time on your side.