Good parents are custodians of kids’ happy memories. For my three brothers and me, this Mother’s Day is full of good ones. TV dinners watching black-and-white telecasts of San Francisco Giants games. Contracting “World Series-itis” — and getting Mom’s OK to cut school to watch Game 7. Nothing, however, could top the day Mom gave us a chance to suit up to play with our Giants heroes.

Mom came to baseball initially with a sense of resignation. Our dad had been a fan growing up in Manhattan — but we moved to Marin in 1953, just missing the last New York Giants’ championship. Seeing how the game brought the family together, Mom grew tolerant of its presence. Her sons collected stacks of baseball cards. We pored over daily box scores. The older boys always let us younger ones tag along to chase Willie McCovey homers rattling around in the Candlestick Park bleachers.

We suffered through decades of futility. Even stocked with future Hall of Famers, the Giants usually finished second. We cheered ourselves hoarse in 1962, then again in the 1989 championship series against the Cubs. But the Earthquake Series left us thinking maybe we’d never witness a Series triumph.

On Christmas morning 1989, Mom gave us the next best thing. Each of the brothers opened a box with a Giants jersey and an envelope. Inside was a summons to Giants Fantasy Camp. For one week, we would play with Cepeda, McCormick, Haller, Montefusco, Speier, Sadek and Willie Mays.

Oh. What. Fun. What unimaginable fun.

Because of the twelve years separating us, we’d never played in the same lineup. Now we got to play together all day, then enjoy evenings listening to the veteran ballplayers’ stories. The most touching of all was from an icon: Willie Mays lit up when he realized he and Mom were both born in Birmingham, Alabama. “These ALL your boys!?” he teased as he posed with her at home plate before the final game.

That last day the campers got to face the Real Giants for an inning and I got to take the mound. There were two on and two out when Mays stepped in. The first pitch, we’d agreed, was a knuckle-curve, served up to The Greatest Player Ever. It was a decent one, floating in knee high, before tumbling. Willie checked his swing, stepped out and called time. He peered at me before calling out in his high-pitched cadence: “What you throwing that crap to ol’ Willie for?!”

Then he dug in.

The next pitch was a belt high lollipop straight-ball. Fifty-eight-year-old Willie flicked his wrists and smacked a one hop liner right at my belt buckle. A grin spread on his face when, out of self-defense, it was caught.

Mom’s love of the Giants flowered after the brothers’ remarkable reunion week. When the Giants finally broke through and won not just one World Championship, but a dynasty-defining three in five years, she poured Champagne. But even more than the Giants’ World Series banners, the memories we created together are treasures.

We lost our mom earlier this year. She passed peacefully, asleep and at home. As the family sorted through her things last month, we found in her closet the Mother’s Day thank you gift we presented her in 1990: her SF Giants uniform jersey, emblazoned on the back, “Mom #1.”

Thanks for the memories, Mom. And thanks for one of the coolest gifts any mom ever gave her kids. And thanks to Willie Mays and the Giants for helping make dreams come true.

Gerry Warburg, a Marin native, is a professor of public policy at the University of Virginia. His late mother, Sandol Milliken Stoddard, authored 26 books and was a pioneer in hospice care.