“I want to give this to the president,” Dad said, holding it up for me in a protective plastic sheath. I chuckled, but inside I wasn’t sure how to react. We’d only have a few seconds with the president and first lady in the holiday reception photo line and it was considered verboten to hand anything to the first couple.

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“Oh, that’s great, but he’s a White Sox fan — from the South Side,” I offered, trying to discourage him.

“I know,” Dad replied, but he explained it was meant as a gesture from one Chicagoan to another.

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“I’ll play it by ear,” he said, slipping it back into his pocket.

For Dad, the card was an artifact of a faraway time and place that he had long since left behind. The Nakamura family had relocated to Chicago from Northern California shortly after being released from four years at the Japanese internment camp at Topaz, Utah, during World War II. My grandfather Naoki, who was born in Japan, took a job at a dry cleaning store. My then 4-year-old father, Robert, born an American citizen in California, turned his attention toward assimilating in the country that had jailed him.

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Baseball, the American pastime, was one way to do that.

Wednesday night, hours before the Cubs took the field for Game 7 of the World Series against the Cleveland Indians, Dad, now 76, had returned, mentally, to his youth.

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“I just checked Google Maps. I grew up only 1.9 miles from Wrigley Field,” he wrote on Facebook. “It seemed so far away then — a different neighborhood. But I was lucky enough to see many Cubs games.”

My father, whose English had suffered while speaking Japanese in the camps, understood early on the universal language of the baseball diamond. And as a player on the team at Waller High, he scored a season pass to Cubs home games from team owner P.K. Wrigley.

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His favorite player wasn’t Banks, but slugger Hank Sauer and outfielder Andy Pafko. But he vividly remembers “Mr. Cub,” one of the team’s first African American players.

“On weekday afternoons, the attendance at the ballpark was sparse,” Dad recalled on Facebook from his condo in Loudoun County, wearing his blue Cubs ball cap with the red “C.” “There were no lights at Wrigley Field, so only afternoon games. And the Cubs were annually trading last place in the National League with the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was easy to find a way into the park. Sometimes we would stand outside on Waveland Ave hoping that a home run ball would find us. Never did. I watched ‘Mr. Cub,’ Ernie Banks, as a rookie. The last World Series championship was 1908, only 45 year before and the last World Series appearance was only 8 years before. I’ve been a Cubs fan for 67 years. Perhaps tonight. GO CUBS!”

As for that Ernie Banks card, here’s what happened: As we approached the Obamas in that receiving line, introduced by a military escort, Dad, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, pulled out the card and handed it to the commander in chief, who looked startled.

That’s when Michelle Obama plucked it from her husband’s hand.

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“I’ll take that,” she said with a smile. “I’m a Cubs fan.”

The president smiled and took it back and put it in his suit pocket “for safe keeping.” We turned toward the White House photographer, who snapped our picture, and then a military escort guided us out of the room.

Dad no longer has the card, but he’ll always have more valuable memories. And now that the Cubs have their first World Series title in 108 years, I think he probably did his little part to help break the curse.