There is no way to understand Oct. 4, 1955 and the great explosive release of giddy, tearful, fist-pumping emotion at 3:45 that Tuesday afternoon without understanding the place from which it all came. These were the Brooklyn Dodgers and they had traveled from Brooklyn, our country, into the heart of darkness, into the majestic confines of Yankee Stadium, into the House that Ruth Built, into the place of long October shadows where doom had so often awaited them. And us. This time, at last, it was different.

In a very important way the tale properly began on that day in August 1945 when the war ended. I was 10 years old. And everywhere in New York church bells were ringing and foghorns blowing. On tenement fire escapes people beat on pots with huge spoons and all work ended and there were kegs of beer in front of all the saloons in my neighborhood. My father, Billy Hamill of the lower Falls Road in Belfast, was among them, singing.

In the midst of the most immense New York block party ever held, some women wept because their sons were coming home from the war. Others because their sons would never come home. Their sons had died in the Hurtgen Forest, on the beach at Anzio, at Guadalcanal or Okinawa. Their names were listed on the sign erected by the Arrows at 13th St. and Eighth Ave. in our neighborhood. The Arrows had played ball for the joy of it before going off to kick the crap out of Hitler and Tojo, and on that day I saw an old man stand on the steps of Gallagher's saloon and salute the sign and the names of those who would never, ever play ball again.

At the same time, on that day in Brooklyn (and thousands of other American towns), more people were happier than they had ever been. It was over. And if you were 10, there was one more immense source of happiness: the ballplayers were coming home too. The professionals. The Dodgers.

At one point, in front of Rattigan's saloon across from where we lived, my father and his friends started singing. They did not try to sing the unsingable national anthem, but they were patriots alright. They began to sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." For Pete Reiser and Pee Wee Reese and all the others. The goddamned war was over. Play ball.

They were all coming home to a Brooklyn of tough human beings, who had endured both the Depression and the war and maintained their pride. Some had come to Brooklyn when the subways opened the borough, graduates of the Five Points or the jammed West Side. Some were immigrants from the late wave of the 1920s. Almost all were blue collar workers, and they were tough. The tough Irish. The tough Italians. The tough Jews. The smaller group of tough African-Americans. In my experience, they were tough, but not mean. Yes: they came from the borough that produced Murder Inc., doing business from the pay phones in Midnight Rose's luncheonette on Saratoga and Livonia in Brownsville. They knew about the hoods in South Brooklyn. They nodded, said hello, but they were too tough to join the hoodlums. They worked. And they worked. And they worked. The tough noble tribes of Brooklyn.

* * *

At home, my father was a man of Northern Irish silences, later epitomized by the Seamus Heaney poem, "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing." But baseball gave us a way to talk. He became an American through baseball. He didn't read de Tocqueville or the Federalist papers; he read Dick Young in the Daily News. We talked about players and trades and the Cardinals and what he called the Goddamned Yankees.

Then in 1947, Jack Roosevelt Robinson first stepped on the sweet green grass of Ebbets Field. In all the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, there was much heated talk about this event, not all of it pleasant, but my father said: "If he can play the game, he should play it for us. This is America, goddammit."

When Robinson came among us, you saw what he meant in the stands of Ebbets Field, where we kids saw the games with free tickets from the Police Athletic League. In 1946, the crowds were almost all white. A year later, the African-Americans, after too long a time, finally joined the other Brooklyn tribes in the stands. Jews and Irishmen and Italians and blacks all roared together for their team. This was seven years before Brown vs. Board of Education, 10 years before anyone in New York ever heard of Martin Luther King. Robinson's arrival as the first black player in the major leagues added another dimension to being a Dodger fan, although as kids we could not name it. That dimension was moral. It was about right and wrong. "This is America, goddamit," my father said. We became the most American place in the whole country.

* * *

Robinson was soon the dynamic heart of the Brooklyn Dodgers and for my generation the closest thing to a "role model" in our lives. He played the game as if his life depended on it. He played with intensity and passion, intelligence and daring. In the secular religion of Brooklyn baseball, he was the Holy Ghost. In one of Spike Lee's movies, he plays a kid wearing Robinson's No. 42, walking, like Robinson, in a quick pigeon-toed way. All over Brooklyn, white kids did the same thing. And all over America, there were Dodger fans who had never seen Brooklyn. They lived in Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi, and many other scary places, in those days and nights when the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan still roamed the nights with rifles in their pick-up trucks. If Robinson's Dodgers won, the Klan lost.

They won and they won and they won, winning far more than they lost, sometimes losing the National League pennant on the final day of the season, or in playoff games, but then in the fall of the years when they did win the pennant, they came up against the Yankees. They lost to the Yankees in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953. In 1941, their great shortstop, Pee Wee Reese, played in the last World Series before the war, and remembered the way they lost when the Dodger catcher Mickey Owen dropped a third strike on Tommy Henrich. The Yankees went on to win. The older fans also remembered 1941.

Even as the great team was assembled - Reese and Robinson, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Gil Hodges and so many others - the final triumph seemed always to elude them. They could not win the World Series. Dodger fans assumed a defensive air of fatalism. They seemed to know the deepest truth behind the cliché about defeat being a greater teacher than victory. If you must lose, they said, then lose with grace. And Robinson showed the way, insisting that if you lose, you must get carried out on your shield. The fans still called their team Dem Bums. On locker doors in the Navy Yard, on the walls of factories, they hung the cartoons showing the Brooklyn Bum as drawn by Leo O'Melia in the Daily News and Willard Mullin in the World-Telegram. The fans knew the Dodgers were now far from being bums. They adopted as a motto "Wait'll Next Year." They never screamed it. They said it flatly, or whispered it. This is America, goddamit, where you always have another chance. For people shaped by depression and war and racism, there was never a better slogan. Some day, they truly believed, Next Year would come.

Early in the '55 season, hope again began to flower. The Dodgers started 21 and 2. Newcombe at one point was 17-1, recovered at last from his two years in the army and the miseries of 1954. But in the final weeks of the regular season, there was fear that Newk had a sore arm and he finished 20-5. Some of the other starting pitchers were shaky, too. Still, the Dodgers ran away with the National League pennant race. And there, in the fall of the year, ahead of them like a wall were the Yankees. As always.

* * *

In those years of eight teams and 154-game seasons, the Series began on Wednesday, Sept. 28 at Yankee Stadium. It was, of course, a day game and 63,869 fans of both teams jammed the ballpark. Many more tuned in. Red Barber, for years the voice of Brooklyn, had defected in 1954 to the Yankees, and was never forgiven. But you could still walk for 10 blocks through Brooklyn, and never miss an at-bat, as the voices of Connie Desmond, Ernie Harwell and a young Vin Scully narrated the game. Something was different about this Yankee team. They had finally found an African-American player worthy of donning pinstripes: the outfielder Elston Howard. It had taken the Yankees eight seasons after the arrival of Robinson to find a black player. No wonder Dodger fans still thought they had a moral edge. No wonder somebody said (I think it was Red Smith of the Herald-Tribune), "Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for United States Steel."

My father heard the game at the factory where he worked. We each worried about Robinson, but neither of us used the phrase "over the hill." Robinson was now 36, his hair scratched with gray. He was about 20 pounds heavier than when he came up. Now he was in another World Series, hitting against Whitey Ford, the greatest of the young Yankee pitchers, a son of Queens. The catcher, of course, was Yogi Berra. Carl Furillo led off the Dodger second with a home run into the right-field stands. Then Robinson tripled to left-center, running as he did when young. Then Don Zimmer, the second baseman, (yes, the same Don Zimmer) singled and Robinson scored. The Dodgers were up 2-0 after two. It didn't last. Howard hit a two-run homer off Newcombe in the bottom of the second to tie the score.

In the following inning, Duke Snider hammered a gigantic home run into the third deck in right field, but the Yankees kept coming. The under-appreciated first baseman Joe Collins hit two home runs (in the 4th inning and the 6th). Then in the eighth, with the Dodgers trailing 6-3, Furillo singled. Robinson smashed a ball off the knee of the Yankee third baseman and made it all the way to second, while Furillo went to third. Zimmer hit a sacrifice fly, scoring Furillo, and Robinson went to third.

All witnesses later said that Robinson seemed young again, taking a daring lead off third, doing his little stutter step, moving back, stepping off again, full of feints, deception his game: while Whitey Ford, a cool southpaw whose back was to third, focused on getting rid of the Dodger pinch hitter, Frank Kellert. He focused a bit too hard, and suddenly Robinson broke for home.

He slid under Berra. The way he had done so many times under so many catchers, daring, audacious, playing the American game.

The umpire said he was safe. Every Yankee fan thought Robinson was out. Every Dodger fan thought he had stolen home in a World Series game. Berra insists to this day that he tagged out Robinson. Ford agreed, but there was always a wink in his replies. It's in the record books forever, but on that day, it didn't matter. The Yankees won, 6-5. Yankees win. Yankees win. Do not stop the presses.

"We'll get them tomorrow," my father said.

But the Yankees won the second game, too. Tommy Byrne pitched a five-hitter and Dodgers starter Billy Loes fell apart in the fourth inning. Yanks win, 4-2. On to Ebbets Field. Doom began to stain the Brooklyn air.

* * *

Not many of us ever saw any of the three games that followed in Ebbets Field. The ballpark could handle 37,000 fans; there were an estimated 3,000,000 Dodger fans in New York. Rumor insisted there was one Yankee fan out in the far reaches of Brooklyn and years later I realized it must have been young Rudy Giuliani.

So the game came to us on radio, and on black-and-white television sets, and in the pages of the Daily News and the Post and the Journal American. I was working in the art department of an advertising agency on W. 47th St., and the games played across the afternoons on the radio. My boss was a Red Sox fan who wanted the Yankees to lose. The papers all told us that no team in the modern era had come back from two opening losses to win the Series. But in Brooklyn, the immortal words "says who?" began to sound as doom swiftly gave way to hope.

In the first of three, Johnny Podres, a young southpaw of apparently ordinary skills (he was 9-10 in the regular season) took the mound as if he were a master. It was his 23rd birthday. Roy Campanella hit a two-run homer in the first, batted home Junior Gilliam in the fourth, and doubled in the eighth. Robinson doubled in the seventh and scored two batters later on a single by a young Cuban player named Sandy Amoros. Podres went all the way, scattering seven hits on the happiest of all birthdays. Dodgers win: 8-3. Nobody used the word bum that day.

Nor was the word used after the fourth and fifth games either. The Dodgers were slamming the Yankee pitching now. And their own pitching was holding up. They returned to Yankee Stadium leading the Series 3-2. Some air went out of the exuberant Dodger partisans in the sixth game, when Ford beat their heroes with a masterful four-hitter, 5-1. But most Dodger fans believed the ancient New York wisdom: it doesn't matter if you get knocked down; what matters is whether you get up.

And so they came to the seventh game, on Oct. 4, before 62,465 paying customers. Tommy Byrne, 35, started for the Yankees, and Brooklyn manager Walter Alston decided against his unsteady ace, Newcombe, and once more chose Podres. That day, the entire city seemed wired into the events in the stadium. Often, pitch by pitch. On 47th St., roars punctuated the afternoon, followed by tense silence.

Gil Hodges batted in two runs, one in the fourth, one in the top of the sixth. Then in the bottom of the sixth, Alston made a defensive switch. He brought Junior Gilliam in from left field to play second base, replacing Don Zimmer. Then he sent Sandy Amoros to left field. That would lead to one of the most famous plays in Dodger history.
In the Yankee sixth, Podres walked Billy Martin. Then Gil McDougald bunted for a hit. The tying runs were on base, with Yogi Berra coming to bat. The great catcher was the most dangerous left-handed hitter in the Yankee lineup, able to smash balls to all fields, often when they were out of the strike zone. Alston moved his outfielders towards right field, expecting Berra to pull the ball. Podres threw an outside fastball and Berra swung.

The ball lifted high toward left field, and started to curve, and Amoros ran. And ran. And ran. He had his gloved right hand straight out before him. Those who were there said the ballpark seemed to inhale. All were thinking similar things: home run, or foul ball, or extra bases. Nobody knew. Not even the men on base. Martin broke from second, eye on the ball. McDougald came charging from first. And Amoros ran.

He caught the ball. And then pivoted, threw immediately to Reese near third base, and Reese whipped it to Gil Hodges. Double play. Hank Bauer then grounded out and Podres went to the tunnel behind the dugout for a cigarette.

Podres held the lead, and in the last of the ninth he got Moose Skowron to ground out and Bob Cerv to fly out, That brought up Elston Howard. Two balls. Two strikes. Then foul ball, foul ball, foul ball, foul ball, foul ball. Five in a row. All fast balls. Then Podres shook off Campanella and threw a change-up.

Howard lunged and made contact. A slow ground ball to short. Ground ball, that is, to Reese. Ground ball to the only Dodger who had been in all the losing World Series against the Yankees since 1941. Reese threw to Hodges, a bit low. Hodges stretched. Three out. This was next year.

* * *

That glorious Tuesday night, I hurried home to Brooklyn on the D train. There were many Dodger fans in the jammed subway car, laughing, some of them singing, many of them rowdy, all of them like me, all of them like Robinson in the first game, all of them heading for home.

When I came up the subway stairs into the neighborhood I knew where I could find my father. He was in Rattigan's on the corner of 11th St. and Seventh Ave. The saloon was packed and roaring, the television set drowned out by the singing and laughter. He saw me coming in and waved me over and we hugged each other.

"It's the day of days," he said. "The day of days."

And so it was. I looked at him and his eyes were wet. He had come from Belfast when he was three years younger than Johnny Podres. He had lost a leg in 1927 playing soccer in the immigrant leagues. A vicious kick by an opposing player shattered his left leg, and that night at the hospital, gangrene attacked him ( a year before the invention of pencillin). In the morning the leg was amputated above the knee. He never did play ball with his six sons, nor did he dance with his only daughter. But he had his American life, refusing the sin of self-pity, and one driving force in that life was the tough little baseball team from Ebbets Field.

Now his Dodgers were champions of the world. In that Brooklyn, there must have been millions like him that beautiful night. Immigrants from all the bad places of the earth, and all their American children. Hugging. Shedding a few joyful tears.

Someone in Rattigan's started singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and my father joined in, hands on the shoulders of Big John Mullin and Buck Vermilyea and Dinny Collins, roaring their national anthem. After a while, I went off to get the bulldog edition of the Daily News, so that my father could read Dick Young, so it would all be verified, proven true by a newspaper. Next Year was here.

There it was, filling page one: Leo O'Melia's wonderful drawing of the joyous, defiant Brooklyn tramp, and the headline, "Who's A Bum?" I bought five copies for 20 cents and carried them back to Rattigan's. On the way, I thought about Robinson, whose body was breaking down, who missed the last game with a bad foot, and would play only one more season. He had endured so much in 1947, taunts, humiliations, racist nonsense. But he had done it, in part, so that another black man could ground out to a Dodger shortstop. He had endured the racist filth so that a black player could hit .237 in the major leagues. He did it so that a kid named Amoros could run and run and run in the greatest of all major league parks and catch a ball and make a throw. In his valiant life, Robinson had won in ways that few men ever win, and not only in ballgames. So had we. I walked in the door of Rattigan's, and heard the familiar words, sung slowly, like a ballad. My father had one hand on the bar, his head raised, as the words of his country filled the smoky air:

Buy me some peanuts and crackerjack,

I don't care if I never get back. . .

Yes: the day of days.