Scenes from the Dodgers' long-awaited World Series parade: 'It means the world'

Baseball is just a game. Except on Friday afternoon at Chavez Ravine, 42,458 fans didn't flock to Dodger Stadium to watch one. 

They arrived with their kids, their friends, their parents and grandparents, many of whom once watched Fernando Valenzuela electrify a city and ignite a movement, for a party both four and 36 years in the making. 

When the Dodgers won it all in 2020, the only fans their stadium welcomed came in the form of cardboard cutouts. The real ones were watching from their homes, confined by the limitations of a pandemic that forced the postseason to be played in a Texas bubble and denied the winners the parade they had always imagined.

Despite all the winning the Dodgers had done over the last few decades, including 11 straight trips to the postseason before this year, they hadn't celebrated a full-season World Series championship since 1988. 

On Friday afternoon, on what would have been Valenzuela's 64th birthday, a city erupted and a long-awaited parade began. 

"It certainly made up for 2020," manager Dave Roberts said. "Obviously there's a lot of players in 2020 that didn't get to appreciate and experience what we experienced, but this is for them, too."

The Dodgers returned home from New York, where they had silenced the critics and naysayers who tried to claim the only championship they'd won in the last 30 years, a 60-game sprint, somehow didn't count the same. They demonstrated they could win in an unprecedented sprint. This year, they displayed they could emerge from a rigorous marathon, too. 

Baseball is just a game, but the tears that welled up in the eyes of Dodgers players when they finally got their parade suggested more. 

The lengthy build-up to the occasion, Clayton Kershaw explained,