I am a fan, more or less, of the English Premier League club Arsenal and the American football team from UCLA.

It occurred to me today why it is that I settled on each of them:

My own appreciation of skill and style … ahead of the more significant essence of physical and mental toughness.

Both lost important and easily winnable games today because of a lack of intestinal fortitude.

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The NBA has taken over Christmas Day.

Not long ago, this was a day ceded to second-tier college football bowl games. The Blue-Gray game was the first thing up. Maybe the Sun Bowl in the afternoon. Nothing that mattered much.

For decades, the NBA didn’t do much to take the day away from the random football available. Perhaps because it underestimated the number of eyeballs available. Perhaps because the NBA was a much less significant competition, pre-Magic-v-Bird.

It staged games, generally one or two, and usually regional rivalries. As recently as 2006 it had just one Christmas game: The Lakers versus the Miami Heat.

Today?

Five NBA games, lined up one after the other, soaking up about 13 hours of programming.

Not only did it feature the now-standard rematch of last season’s finals teams, the league staged four more with 1) good teams and/or 2) interesting players.

So, yes, the league has seized December 25, reflecting both the NBA’s rising popularity as well as the insatiable American appetite for live sports programming.

Especially when it features matchups as tasty as the Golden State Warriors and Stephen Curry playing the Cleveland Cavaliers and LeBron James.

Which ended 89-83 in favor of the Warriors and told us … what?

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An American Christmas. We had not done one of those since 2007.

A semi-surprising stat, in retrospect, given that I had not been outside Southern California on December 25 for a very long time … and maybe never, through 2007.

Then came Hong Kong in 2008 and Abu Dhabi from 2009 through 2014. And I’m guessing more and more Americans are experiencing this — Christmases far from home, as more of us take jobs overseas.

So, any changes to be noted in the Stateside Christmas, after an eight-year gap?

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A few cultural concepts don’t travel well outside the United States.

Barbecue.

“American” football.

Country-and-western music.

Pie.

Pie doesn’t seem that difficult, does it?

A fruit filling. A flaky pastry crust. A glazed top-crust. A pie tin.

But it just doesn’t seem to work out, most of the time, if you are outside the borders of the USA. No one much makes fruit pies, and some of the key elements in the pie are hard to obtain.

Which might explain why one of us shouted “pie!” as we drove past a venerable old Long Beach diner, on our second full day Stateside.

And a few minutes later?

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This is a weird and memorable flight. I now have done it twice, once in coach and once in business.

But we did encounter one apparent change, between the first journey on EY171 (last summer) and the second (yesterday) — the route became something that stretches our understanding of the planet.

There it is, above, on the map. Check it out.

When was the last time you took a plane that flew north of Greenland?

Two things about that bit of information:

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After six years and two months in Abu Dhabi, we leave the UAE for the final time today, headed for Los Angeles on flight EY171, Etihad’s 16-hour-plus nonstop to LAX.

It was a fast six years, filled with challenges unimagined during previous incarnations as California journalists.

Each of us added a significant stretch to our print journalism careers, earning solid salaries in a tax-free environment at a time when jobs in the U.S. dried up and those that survived carried significantly less remuneration.

These six years also were memorable for what we learned about this part of the world.

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I have voted for the Futbol de Primera award — formerly the Honda Award — for most of two decades.

The award, voted on by journalists, goes to the U.S. national team player judged to have been the best performer in a calendar year.

Michael Bradley is the winner, for the first time, over Clint Dempsey in a fairly close race. I am pleased the midfielder and captain finished first, and not just because I had him No. 1 on my ballot.

It was time for him to be recognized.

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Drones?

Turn the birds of prey loose on them!

This became a local story, in Dubai, when someone’s drone, hovering over Jumeirah Park, was brought down by a falcon, as explained in this story in The National.

A Polish expat, who witnessed the falcon attack, got a photo of the falcon perched atop its victim, after it fell into a woman’s garden, a drone the bird may have mistaken for prey.

Or, the story notes, the falcon may have associated the drone with food, a not-unreasonable expectation given that falcons — enormously popular with Emiratis and considered a key element in their culture — now apparently are trained to find meat being carried by drones.

The additional fun with this story?

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This has been a point of pride, in the UAE, for months now:

Not only was a significant fraction of the first half hour of Star Wars: The Force Awakens filmed in the deserts of Abu Dhabi … the movie premiered for the public here yesterday, December 16, two days ahead of the North American release.

(Above, two Emiratis with someone dressed as a stormtrooper, ahead of a showing at Emirates Palace yesterday. Photo by The National)

And we saw it tonight, December 17, the day before anyone we know in the U.S. could see it.

So … hah!

I was expecting a bigger turnout at the cineplex’s big room, at the World Trade Centre, in Abu Dhabi, but 1) it was in its second day of showing on approximately a billion screens in the UAE, and 2) the country has a population of about 10 million.

So filling the theater at 9:20 p.m. on Day 2 of the local release … perhaps a bit ambitious.

And what did we think of the film?

Careful: A bit of a spoiler coming up after the break.

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