I’d also like to say a belated public thanks to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who stunned this blog and a small swarm of guests with not just a primo batch of seats behind home plate, but a personal escort and pre-game field passes, allowing us to tromp around the edges of the field itself while the pros were taking warmups.

When I was a kid in Cleveland in the 1970s, Dodger Stadium was this unimaginably faraway place where it never rained and the team never sucked and the players seemed friendly and the stands were filled with people from TV.

Sure enough, we got a perfect night, the Dodgers were playing for first place, and while we were hanging out, closer Takashi Saito wandered by to greet a Japanese guest near us. Then Dodgers manager Grady Little wandered over for a quick chat with us all, and about five seconds later I started noticing the stands behind me filling with recognizable faces. So this was exactly what I had imagined about 35 years earlier. I wondered briefly if I was actually still eight years old and only daydreaming.

Anyhow, this whole thing was unexpected and severely cool, and I’ve been meaning to grab a minute and say how much I appreciated it for weeks. So to Ellen and the entire Dodgers front office: thanks from all of us for a wonderful, memorable, terrific evening.