Value cannot be null error When Trying to View a SharePoint Site

We ran into a problem after restoring a SharePoint 2007 farm that stumped us for awhile. Namely, the MySites web application wouldn't come up; it had restored successfully, but we'd get a generic error message when we'd try to browse to it. Once we had turned on detailed error reporting, we saw the following error code:

Value cannot be null. Parameter name: serverContext at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager..ctor(ServerContext serverContext, Boolean IgnoreUserPrivacy, Boolean backwardCompatible) at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager..ctor(ServerContext serverContext, Boolean IgnoreUserPrivacy) at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileLoader.EnsureUserProfile() at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileLoader.GetUserProfile() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.CreatePersonalSpace.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs args) at System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) at System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.PageBase.OnLoad(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint,Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)

Now this made no sense whatsoever; what's null? The application looked like it was set up correctly, and it had been working before we did the backup and restore (it was a test run of our DR process). Unfortunately, too, all I could find on the web that referenced the error was information about coding tasks, which isn't what I'm doing at all. Finally, we fixed it: Alternate Access Mappings. We were using SSL to access the site (through a netscaler load balancer), but post-restore, SharePoint only had http:// in its configuration. After re-adding https:// as a public URL for the web application, the error goes away.