This is 12th time the New York Yankees and Los Angeles (formerly Brooklyn) Dodgers have met in baseball's World Series, and as a Yankees fan, I have forlorn memories from the first one I can remember from 1963.

I was a fourth-grader at John B. Stanton School in Norwich, where city kids were as passionate then about playing baseball as we were about following it in the newspaper, on transistor radios and black-and-white televisions.

Norwich was a baseball hotbed featuring spirited, year-round debate among fans of all ages. Most of us favored the Yankees who had won 27 American League pennants by then — including seven in the previous eight years — and 20 World Series championships, including the previous two in 1961 and 1962. Everyone loves a winner, after all.

We would devour the sports section every morning, especially the agate page, where box scores were published, so we could see how our teams and favorite players had done the night before.

Locally, we rooted for Norwich Free Academy's great baseball teams as well. Coached by the stoic Rene Ledoux and assistant Jim Giordano and led by players like Dave Galligan, Lloyd Hinchey, George Strous, Ed Donovan, Fran Archambault and Austin Fish, the NFA Wildcats had won Class LL state championships in 1960 and 1961 and were always at or near the top of the standings in the old Capital District Conference.

During the dog days of summer, we would play some variation of baseball from after breakfast until it was too dark to see the ball. We would play at Stanton School or in my best friend Kenny Armstrong's large backyard further down on New London Turnpike. The games were often family affairs with John, Bob and Fran Monahan, Jimmy and David McCaffery, Richie and Bobby Lenkiewicz, Dennis, Paul and Ted Daniska, Paul and Alan Berman, Neil and John Brown and our own Sultan of Swat, Bo Cipriani, who could hit the ball a country mile.

Having won the previous two World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in 1961 and the San Francisco Giants in 1962, the Yankees were heavy favorites against the Dodgers in 1963, at least in our corner of the world. Back then, World Series games were played in the afternoon, so we would literally run home from school in time to catch the games' later innings.

Looking back, that was what many of us longtime fans still consider baseball's golden era, when players spent most or all of their careers with the same team and earned a small fraction of what today's players are paid. Mickey Mantle's annual salary never went above $100,000. Today, he would command around $40 million per year.

As avid fans, we knew the names of all the Yankees, their positions, their places in the batting order, home runs, batting averages — everything. The usual lineup was shortstop Tony Kubek leading off; second baseman Bobby Richardson; left fielder Tommy Tresh; Mantle — every kid's hero — batted cleanup and played center field; right fielder Roger Maris; catcher Elston Howard; first baseman Joe Pepitone; and Clete Boyer at third.

With a star-studded lineup like that, the Yankees couldn't lose, we thought, especially with ace Whitey Ford, a 24-game winner that season, as our Game 1 starting pitcher at baseball's cathedral, Yankee Stadium. No one knew much about the Dodgers back then because they played most of their games on the west coast, too late to be included in the next day's east coast sports sections.

You can imagine my shock when I got home on the afternoon of Oct. 2, 1963, turned on the TV and learned that the Yankees were losing to the Dodgers 5-0 in the seventh inning. Johnny Roseboro, the L.A. catcher and No. 8 man in the Dodgers' lineup, had hit a three-run homer off Ford in the second inning. The Dodgers' pitcher, Sandy Koufax, had already struck out a dozen Yankees and would finish the game with what was then a World Series-record 15 strikeouts against the vaunted Yankees.

Tresh would hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth inning to break up the shutout, but Koufax had otherwise been almost unhittable, striking out every Yankee except Boyer at least once. Mantle, Kubek and Tresh fanned twice, and Richardson, who had struck out only 22 times that season in 668 plate appearances, whiffed three times. It was the only time he did that in 1,412 games over his 11-year career.

For the first time in my young life, the once-infallible Yankees looked old and vulnerable. It didn't get better through the rest of the series, as the Dodgers would go on to sweep the Yankees in four games. Koufax, the winning pitcher in Games 1 and 4, and fellow pitchers Johnny Podres and Don Drysdale, limited the powerful Yankee offense to only four runs and 22 hits in four games.

My friends and I were stunned and inconsolable, but we reasoned that there would always be the following season. As expected, the Yankees won the American League pennant again in 1964, but lost again in the World Series, this time to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games.

That era of Yankee dominance had come to a close. The following year, 1965, they would fall to sixth place, 25 games out of first place, and in1966 were dead last, 26 1/2 games behind the first-place Baltimore Orioles, who would sweep the Dodgers in the World Series. It would be a dozen years before the Yankees would win another pennant and 13 until they captured another World Series title.

Those were lean, dark years, something like what Yankees fans endured for the past 15 years without a World Series championship or even a pennant. Hopefully, against those hated L.A. Dodgers, we'll get it done this time and secure that long-awaited 28th World Series title.

Go, Yankees!

Bill Stanley, a former reporter at The Day, is a retired vice president of Lawrence + Memorial Hospital.