It's like déjà vu all over again

The Dodgers are playing the Yankees in the World Series, and this brings back wonderful memories.

I was born in the Bronx, N.Y., where the Yankees were, and lived in upper Manhattan near where the Giants were. When I moved to Long Island, my Uncle Izzy from Brooklyn would always turn on Vin Scully covering the Brooklyn Dodgers games when he visited our house in Roslyn. Sandy Koufax was the Dodgers’ star pitcher and he was Jewish, so I became a Dodger fan.

The Dodgers hadn’t won a World Series yet, but they did in 1955 when I was 9 years old, beating the Yankees in seven games. Two years later, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles so I became a New York Mets fan. I ended up a Hollywood movie and TV director, so I forgave the Dodgers for moving and renewed my faith in them.

I was sports editor of my high school and college newspapers and became a sportswriter for the Suffolk Sun in Long Island. I got to interview Kareem Abdul Jabbar in person at a Knicks game and Wayne Gretzky at a hockey game.

When I became a Newsday reporter, I no longer covered sports, and many of my close friends started smoking marijuana, so I headed to graduate school in Denver. At my first class, the teacher told us what a movie director did and that launched my wonderful career as an Oscar- and Emmy-winning director.

Now I’m back to being a journalist and my column just won best in the state again and my editor Ken Stern suggested a column about how much the Dodger-Yankee World Series would mean to me.

I could not ask for a better World Series matchup. The Dodgers won game 3 Monday and that put them one game away from a World Series title, just as I reached my deadline for this column, which makes me very optimistic about a very happy ending.