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The second game of the World Series was being played that night in the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Ringolsby was calling from his home on a plateau outside Cheyenne, Wyo.

"We're in the middle of a blizzard,'' he said. "We're supposed to wind up with 30 inches of snow. If this global warming doesn't stop soon, we're all going to freeze to death.''

Ringolsby was home in Wyoming rather than in New York because his Denver newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, was folded this spring.

"How many World Series had you covered in a row?'' I asked.

"Thirty,'' he said.

I was Tracy's runningmate for a good share of those World Series. I covered 24 in a row - from 1981 through 1987 for the St. Paul newspapers, then from 1988 through 2005 for the Star Tribune. There was no Series played in 1994, of course, because the players strike ended the season in mid-August.

I was bounced from World Series duties in 2006, which actually was fortuitous, since the competition between Detroit and St. Louis was so shoddy it was difficult to illicit enthusiasm.

I did manage to get to the round member of 25 Series covered in 2007, when the Red Sox marched through Ringolsby's Rockies. I was back on the sideline for the 2008 Series and now morning radio is my full-time calling, with part-time duties as a stay-at-home sports columnist for the Star Tribune.

Not that it made any difference for this Yankees and Phillies showdown, since the Star Tribune - in another bow to newspaper economics - did not send a reporter to the World Series for the first time ... in how many years?

I do know it is well over 50 years, since the Minneapolis Morning Tribune traditionally had a reporter at the World Series even when this was a Triple-A outpost in the ‘50s.

There was some melancholy in conversing with the snowbound Ringolsby on Thursday, since the World Series for me remains the most-anticipated event in American sports. There was always the mystery in how the first-to-four tournament would play out, and always an excitement in trying to hit deadline with coherent copy no matter the late-inning twists.

That excitement had a tendency to turn to panic in this decade, as the combination of pitchers taking forever between pitches, and umpires unwilling to call strikes, and endless mound visits by catchers, and longer TV breaks between innings, has caused a four-hour, nine-inning game to go from unheard of to almost routine.

And yet I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else on the planet other than St. Louis on the October night in 2004 that the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918, or on the South Side of Chicago a year later, when the White Sox gave that two-team city its first World Series championship since 1917.

The first World Series that I covered in 1981 gave me a chance to sit next to Red Smith, the greatest sportswriter of all, for three nights in an auxiliary press box in Yankee Stadium. It also was a Series when Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was in his prime as a tyrannical character.

It was in the middle of this Series in Los Angeles that Steinbrenner showed up with cuts and bruising on his face. His explanation was that he had encountered some LA punks in a hotel elevator, and when they started bad-mouthing New York, he put on his SuperGeorge cape and leaped into action.

According to George, he was able to take the insults aimed at him and the Yankees, but when it spilled over to New York as a city, he had to defend the good people of Gotham.

We were in New York again in 1986 for the Mets-Red Sox. Game Six was such a remarkable event that I wanted a rainout for the first time in my life, in order to give the after-midnight finish proper attention in followup stories. The rainout came on Sunday, then a marvelous seven-game World Series ended with another Red Sox failiure on Monday.

The Twins' first championship followed in '87, and two years later, the Earthquake Series, and two years after that - the best World Series that I had the privilege the cover, the Twins over the Braves in seven games.

The '93 tournament was also wonderful, with Jim Fregosi's Funhouse Phillies losing in six to a magnificent Toronto ballclub, and there was Arizona doing baseball the favor of ending the Yankees' title run in 2001, and then the two varieties of Sox, both long deprived.

And, oh yeah, there was the riot that followed the Tigers' clobbering of San Diego in five games in 1984. There were flames on the streets outside the old wooden ballpark, and a helicopter landing on the infield in darkness,and we thought in the press box it was the start of an evacuation, and instead it was Detroit owner Tom Monaghan sending us Domino's pizzas.

I loved the World Series - and still do, only now from a distance.