LOS ANGELES — The climb is mountainous, trouble lurking at every step.

One bad dribble, and Denver runs the other direction, creating an open three. One missed assignment, and Aaron Gordon cuts baseline for a dunk. One whiffed box out and the Nuggets get a second, and sometimes, a third chance.

One missed shot, and the margins get tighter, the chances get smaller, the ending gets closer.

One more tough night and the season will be done.

Boos started to fill Crypto.com Arena by the fourth quarter, this time coming after a mistake on a screen led to an open Denver dunk.

The realization had set in — one that probably should’ve been realized sooner. The fact that the Lakers have been close to beating the Nuggets in the last 11 games has been no consolation. In fact, it probably makes it worse.

Denver, like it always seems to do, was always there to gleefully capitalize on every Lakers mistake, every execution error. The Nuggets’ 112-105 win, even more so than their previous wins of the series, felt like relatively light work, with the Lakers dispatched relatively early in the second half.

The Lakers now trail Denver 3-0 in the best-of-seven playoff series — no team in NBA history has ever come back from that deficit.

The Nuggets out-scored the Lakers by 18 in the second and third quarters, the game logs looking like they could’ve been Xeroxed from any of the previous 11 meetings between the teams, 11 games the Denver Nuggets have won.

It wasn’t even Nikola Jokic’s night to rip the heart out of the Lakers. Foul trouble zapped some of his aggressiveness (his “off” night yielded 24 points, 15 rebounds and nine assists). And the Lakers again defended Jamal Murray fairly well, holding him to 22 points on eight-of-21 shooting.

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