My luck was so great on that fabled night 28 years ago, the last time the Philadelphia Phillies won a World Series. But my luck and timing was so rotten this time, when the Phillies managed to win their second world championship, last night.
For the first event, I managed to get into Veterans Stadiuim and witness history. For the second, I was sitting in a high school bleachers seat, watching a soccer game that began, and thus ended, much later than I had anticipated.
Yes, my lifestyle has changed somewhat in the past 28 years. I love my kids and their soccer games. I wouldn't miss it for anything. But couldn't I have been in two places at once, somehow?
This was an odd one for many of us, this World Series. You had two teams -- the Philadelphia Phillies, the Tampa Bay Rays -- who were traditional underdogs, and so you had no bad guys. There was nobody to root against.
But I chose the Phillies, because I like ballparks that don't have roofs (Tropicana "Field" in Florida is a ridiculous structure) and I prefer the old town teams to the Sunbelters.
I'm a night owl, but even I was unable to hang in for Saturday night's game, which the Phillies won at about 1:45 a.m. Sunday. Then, after a boring 10-2 Phillies win Sunday night, the rains came. Game five got as far as the 6th inning Monday night (a 2-2 tie) before the storm forced it to be suspended. They couldn't play Tuesday night, as the monsoon continued.
That brought us to Wednesday night, when my two daughters had an important soccer game, playing for the Southern Connecticut Conference high school championship. Their team, Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, had never made it that far.
I figured I could see their game, which was to start at 7:30 p.m. at Shelton High School, then get back home in time for the climax of the World Series. But the boys' championship went into double overtime -- nobody could score -- then a penalty kicks shoot-out. (For those keeping score at home, Amity 1, Guilford 0). This pushed back the start of our game to 8:15 p.m.
Making the night even more unpleasant was the outcome of the Cross game vs. Daniel Hand High School of Madison. They beat us, 2-0.
While consoling my daughters afterward, I was also thinking about that Series game. Could I possibly make it back in time? It was 10:00; they had started playing in Philadelphia at about 8:30. It was a long shot.
When I ran into my house, the game wasn't on and I knew it was over. I had to go to my computer and check on-line to get the news that the Phillies were world champs. What a way to find out...
I cast my mind back to 1980, when I was a young reporter (I was 30) for the New Haven Register, unmarried and always up for an adventure. Realizing the Phillies could win their first world championship in their long history that night, I spontaneously decided to hop an Amtrak train out of New Haven and take it to Philly. Maybe I could buy a scalper's ticket, I fantasized.
I wish I remember more about that crazy day. I don't keep diaries but I do keep calendars with details of every day. And because, as Casey Stengel said, "You could look it up," I did look up my calendar from 1980, the night of Oct. 21, and I read: "Philly! A $40 scalper. Phillies 4, K.C. 1! World Champs! STREET PARTY!"
The entry for the following day: "I love a parade!"
I do remember staying over that night with my buddy, Dick Wood, then a student at Wharton Business School in that old city. I do remember great exuberance and celebration in the streets. I do remember sitting in the bleachers and seeing Tug McGraw toss his glove into the air and start jumping around as he recorded the final out.
But the scalper? I have no memory of him.
Life was simpler then, eh? Imagine trying to buy a World Series face value ticket today for 40 bucks, let alone a scalper's ticket. Imagine just walking up to somebody outside a ballpark on the night the hometown team is on the verge of winning a world championship that has never happened before, and obtaining a seat for 40 smackers.
No matter what else happens to me, I'll always have Philadelphia and that unbelieavable night.

It was good to see Lula White again, on a recent morning at the New Haven Free Public Library.
I first met her at her home in Hamden in 2004 after somebody alerted me that a "Freedom Rider" was living in our area.
Picture this: at age 22 she got on a bus with a small group of other brave, idealistic and determined people and rode into the deep South to protest segregation laws.
She didn't tell her father she was going because she knew that "like most parents, he would not want me to risk my life. Later he told me, 'You should let boys do things like that.' I asked him, 'What if there aren't enough boys to do it?'"
White rode down into Mississippi in the summer of 1961, when "Freedom Riders" were being beaten by angry white mobs for speaking up on behalf of oppressed black people. Before they even got to Jackson, Miss., White's group had their bus surrounded by a large crowd of white men, who shouted at them and rocked the vehicle.
"We didn't know what would happen if the bus got turned over," she told me. Imagine that. Imagine being on that bus.
But the mob did not succeed in toppling the bus and the group continued to Jackson, where another mob awaited them. White and the eight others walked off that bus and walked past that mob and strode into the bus station, into a room that said "white only." (Despite her name, White is black.) And the police took them away and to jail, for "breach of peace."
She was behind bars for two months, having food slid into her cell. She was allowed out of that cell only to take a shower, which was carefully timed. Imagine that.
White was at our library on a recent Monday to promote a new book called "Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders." It was written by Eric Etheridge, who had never heard of Lula White until after he finished the book.
But Etheridge will be in New Haven Oct. 29 for a luncheon fund-raiser to benefit the library. That night, at 6 p.m., he and White will be among the panelists at the library for a "civic engagement conversation" which is free and open to the public.
The idea is to encourage other people, including youths, to take a stand the way Lula White did in 1961. Find a cause and make a difference.
During her remarks at the library Oct. 6, White said that recounting her "Freedom Rider" days "reminds me of a time when I was more hopeful. I thought things would change drastically and quickly. But that's not the way things work."
She does not mean to discourage anybody, however. She wants people to get out there and do something.