If you paid close attention Wednesday night, in the aftermath of the final out of the NLCS, you heard the voice — for so long the soundtrack of one lost Mets summer after another — betray Howie Rose just a bit. There’s a little catch in his throat, a little crack.

And the Brooklyn-born, Queens-bred Rose makes no apologies.

“I can literally tell you, from the age of 12, I dreamt of saying those words the other night: ‘The Mets win the pennant,’ ’’ Rose said. “I know there’s a point … a little after the initial call, I can hear my voice just slip a little bit into some emotion.

“All I can tell you is, it’s organic. It’s heartfelt.”

That’s the way it goes when you’ve invested in the Mets since the moment the franchise was born. But there was a time when the 61-year-old Rose, a voice of the Mets either on radio or television since 1996, was a Yankees fan.

Relax, Flushing faithful, it was just a phase.

Rose’s father, Bob, was a Yankees fan, and given Dad’s leanings and with no other team to root for in New York in the early 1960s, Howie fell in line. He said his first baseball memory is of the 1960 World Series. That Series ended with Bill Mazeroski’s game-winning homer in the ninth inning of Game 7 disappearing over the left-field wall in Pittsburgh, as Yogi Berra watched helplessly from the warning track.

“That’s the very first baseball game I remember watching,” Rose said. “I didn’t know anything, but my father had trained me on the positions and the lineup. So I knew Yogi Berra was a catcher.

“Now, I was 6 years old and I remember thinking, ‘It’s tough being a catcher. You have to take all that equipment off and run all the way out into the outfield and he still almost caught that ball.’ Duh. But that’s when I got involved in baseball.”

He would follow the Yankees in 1961, as Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle took aim at Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record. But in 1962 the Mets were born, and Rose’s life never would be the same.

“As an 8-year-old narcissist, I thought, like a lot of kids who are so self-oriented, the Mets were created just for me,” he said. “Now I’m a baseball fan. Here, have a new team.

“But I fell in love with them right away. I remember they played their first game on a school night. … I have no memory of watching the game, but I do vividly recall going into my parents’ room the next morning and asking my dad how the Mets did. He said they lost, and I was genuinely disappointed. … There’d be 119 more disappointments that year.’’

That summer the Roses moved from The Bronx to Bayside. And, after the Mets moved from the Polo Grounds to Shea Stadium in 1964, Rose became a regular.

“I should have had a mailbox there — upper deck behind home plate, Section 1, Row A,” he said. “Since literally Day 1 of the Mets franchise, I’ve had either an emotional or professional connection to them.”

That, of course, is what makes this season’s unexpected ride to the World Series, which begins Tuesday night in Kansas City, so enjoyable. Rose has been all-in since Day 1, but this is the first time he will be behind the microphone for the Mets in a World Series game. The games can be heard on WOR with Rose joined by his partner, Josh Lewin.

In 2000, previously the Mets’ most recent trip to the Fall Classic, Rose was part of the Mets TV crew but was reduced to pregame and postgame work because FOX carried the Series games. In 1986, when the Mets beat the Red Sox, Rose was working for WCBS Radio as a reporter.

“I was assigned to cover some of the games,” he said. “And the other games I was in the upper deck [as a fan]. So I was working for the [Bill] Buckner game and in the upper deck for Game 7.”

The following season, Rose joined WHN, which would soon morph into WFAN, and hosted the Mets pregame and postgame radio programming. And now here we are.

Rose said he wishes he could come up with a “more sophisticated or original” description for this season than the one he keeps coming back to — “magical.”

He said it all fell into place July 31, the day the Mets traded for Yoenis Cespedes. That night Wilmer Flores, who was nearly traded to Milwaukee two days earlier and cried on the field when he learned of the possibility, hit a walk-off homer to beat the Nationals, and the Mets were on their way.

“I swear when that ball went over the fence it turned into pixie dust,” Rose said. “Seriously, everything from there on is Disney. … It’s a fairy tale, and it still is, and I hope there’s one more chapter to be written.”

Rose remembered going to a game in 1966, when Ron Swoboda’s pinch-hit home run beat Juan Marichal and the Giants to cap a big comeback.

“And all the way home to Bayside, all I kept thinking was, ‘I wonder how Lindsey [Nelson] made it sound on TV and how Murph [Bob Murphy] made it sound on radio,’ ” Rose said.

“That’s what I mean about this thing going all the way back to those days. And that’s why having those words come out of my mouth the other night was literally a dream come true. A very, very emotional moment. And I just hope there’s one more to come.”