Three fire trucks and a cop car, their sirens blaring, raced through Richmond on Saturday and the news was all good.

Nico Medeiros was having his 9th birthday.

“Wow,” said Nico, perhaps a dozen times.

Like most everyone else on planet Earth, Nico has been holed up indoors and none too happy about it. His grandma in Florida, along with his parents, cooked up the idea to call the Richmond cops and the firefighters and inquire very politely if they could possibly swing by at high noon, assuming Richmond was otherwise behaving itself. Sure, they replied.

Nico has wanted to be a cop since preschool, more than half his lifetime ago. Apparently the cops, whose numbers are down, wanted to make sure Nico doesn’t change his mind, and the firefighters wanted a piece of the action, too.

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“The fire crew and fire engine will be driving by your house at noon,” the Fire Department wrote back. “Happy birthday, Nico!”

What happened next will clearly live forever in the history of Northshore Drive.

The Fire Department didn’t send only one engine. It sent three. And the cops sent a squad car. And every red light was flashing, every siren was wailing and every horn was blaring.

And they all stopped in front of Nico’s house, where the blue balloons were, and where Nico was standing wide-eyed with his parents, Mauricio and Christina, and his 7-year-old brother, Stefano.

Then the vehicles circled the block and came by again, just as noisily, in case anyone was trying to take a nap in the middle of an important event like Nico’s birthday.

Two dozen neighbors, alerted by a neighborhood website, stood in front of their homes, wearing the kind of masks that the cops don’t mind seeing these days. Newbie the German shepherd came out too, on a leash held by his owner, Cassie Cherner.

“Biggest thing that’s happened around here since the Fourth of July fireworks,” Cherner said.

“Woof,” Newbie said.

Nico, who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned “Happy Quarantined Birthday to Me,” said he knew this wasn’t an ordinary birthday because nothing these days is ordinary.

“It’s been kind of hard to have fun,” he said. “It makes you feel kind of crazy that you can’t get out. Not just kind of crazy. Really crazy.”

Even being allowed extra computer time to play more rounds of his favorite online game, Roblox, with his pals doesn’t make up for not going outside.

“Not seeing anybody really bothers me,” he said. “But we’re healthy. I’m glad about that.”

Five minutes later, the fire trucks and the cop car were gone. Nico and his family went back inside their home, a place where Nico knew he would be spending the first part of his 10th year. The rest of his neighbors, including Newbie, went back inside, too.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF