They celebrated in Highland Park and the San Fernando Valley, across Sunset Boulevard and at Chavez Ravine and wherever there are Dodgers fans on this big blue marble called Earth.

But really, East Los Angeles was the only place to be the night the Blue Crew won their eighth World Series.

As the team marched through the Fall Classic against the hated New York Yankees, I wanted to see the fans go wild in the Mexican-American heart of the Southland. On the Atlantic Boulevard corridor between Whittier and Olympic boulevards, TV news helicopters have covered the pachangas – shindigs – which erupt spontaneously whenever the Dodgers, Lakers or the Mexican national soccer team win a big game.

The partying was already so exuberant after the Dodgers’ first three wins — street takeovers and cruising, loud bandas and louder fireworks — that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department closed the area during Game 4 and announced it would do the same for Game 5.

How would fans react?

I showed up at the bottom of the first inning at Paradise Sports Bar on the Atlantic, a stone’s throw from Olympic. A mural of Vin Scully in a Lakers jersey and Kobe Bryant in a Dodgers jersey decorated the exterior. Inside, handmade cardboard circles with the Dodgers logo surrounded by crystals hung on the wall.

The crowd was already somber. The score was 3-0, Yankees.

There was a special guest with me: my 73-year-old father. He had insisted on going, ‘just to see’ what might happen. When I said it might have been better if he had stayed home in case the situation got out of hand, Papi scoffed.

“Mexicans will go crazy,” he said, “but they won’t be stupid.”

Paradise bartender Johanna Duque, 48, opened a Negra Modelo for me and a Coke for my father, who used to come here when he was a child. borracho – a drunkard – decades ago.

She asked where we were from and why we came all the way from Anaheim. When I responded that we wanted to be part of the Eastlos crowd after a Dodgers championship, Duque laughed and shook her head.

“Oh, you want the desmadre,” the Guatemalan immigrant said in Spanish. ‘It will be so terrible.”

It initially seemed hopeless, as the Dodgers fell behind 5-0 after three innings. Worse, some pocho kept plucking dreary arena rock in English and Spanish – Pink Floyd and the Doors, Enanitos Verdes and Caifanes – from the digital jukebox drowning out the baseball broadcast.

To distract from the racket, my dad – dressed in a Dodgers jersey and hat – rattled off some of the long-gone bars he used to frequent on the Eastside. El Regis and La India Bonita. Lisa’s place. The Flamingo Inn.

“Hey, isn’t Steve Garvey on the run from something?” he asked suddenly. “I want to vote for him!”

More people poured in.

“Hope never dies, baby!” Duque shouted in Spanish over Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” As if on cue, the Dodgers scored five unearned runs in the top of the fifth inning, waking up the comatose Paradise crowd.

I put on ‘Por Una Mujer Casada’ by Banda El Recodo to lighten the mood and stepped outside to see if the police had blocked the Atlantic Ocean yet.

Not yet.

Back in the bar, Francisco Salas washed down a plate of grilled chicken with a Dos Equis.

“It’s one thing to celebrate, another to destroy,” the Jalisco resident said in Spanish. ‘If they sail calmly, that’s fine. But when they do this” – he turned his finger in a circle – “the police shut everything down.”

“What do you think?” Duque asked me. I said it would be cool if the Sheriff’s Department blocked the Atlantic Ocean, but only if it allowed people to take it over, a la a block party.

She shook her head again.

‘Have you been here? It won’t be pretty. Because the problem is that people don’t respect authority. Les Vale.” They didn’t care.

Diana Parra, an East LA native, was in Paradise with her friend Jorje Acosta, who she easily persuaded to come from Palmdale for Game 5.

“We want to be here to see what I call ‘the parade,’” Parra, 29, said. ‘Not the official one, but Whittier’s! You need to be with other Dodger fans. It’s a feeling of home.”

“We couldn’t really celebrate the last championship because of COVID,” the 42-year-old Acosta said. He was wearing a black and yellow Dodgers jersey with Kobe’s 24 on it. “If we win, we deserve this.”

The two screamed for joy along with the rest of us as the Dodgers scored two runs in the top of the eighth.

I stepped out in the bottom of the ninth. Atlantic was now completely closed from Olympic to just north of Whittier. A group of CHP officers looked down at a smartphone streaming the game and waited.

The fireworks went off when Walker Buehler struck out Alex Verdugo to win the Series. Inside Paradise, “I Love LA” sounded as everyone hugged each other and ordered more cube bag (buckets of beer).

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

I grabbed my dad and walked out onto the Atlantic Ocean toward Whittier. The pachanga was on.

People poured out of businesses and homes, hugging and high-fiving friends and strangers. Honking cars drove through Whittier to the blockade and then made a U-turn. The air became thick with white smoke as people burned out their tires while stuck in traffic or fired bottle rockets from the backs of trucks.

Hundreds of people turned into thousands within minutes. We all marched east, taken over by a common sense of ecstasy that we didn’t know what to do with except to do it together.

Which blockage?

“People are really getting out of hand,” Salvador Rodriguez said in Spanish on the corner of Amalia Avenue. He lives down the street. “But people want to celebrate – this is Los Angeles sports.”

Nearby, Parra and Acosta waved at the cars as Ernesto Montes and David Perales of Maywood filmed the scene with their smartphones.

“I’m here to witness greatness,” said Montes, 26, before shouting “Dodgers!” shouted.

“LA has had a tough time,” Perales, 23, added. “Let’s show the world how we run LA!”

People lined the streets waving Dodgers flags they bought from a vendor to match the Dodgers gear they were all wearing: shirts and ponchos. Jackets and sombreros. Pajamas and scarves. Even onesies or tissues for dogs.

Gustavo Flores and his wife Sandy stood with their two young children in front of a Taco Bell at the corner of Whittier and Goodrich boulevards. Three-year-old Katalina slept on her father’s shoulder.

“We want to show them history,” said Gustavo, 28, with a smile as wide as the grille of a Chevrolet Impala.

“We’ve been watching matches all our lives. We were stressed all night. Now we can be happy!” Sandy, 25, added.

Freddy Sanguino of Hacienda Heights wore a Freddie Freeman jersey as he walked down the middle of Whittier Boulevard. He held up a miniature World Series trophy and let people in cars take selfies with him.

“I can’t even explain how good this feels,” Sanguino said. “Twenty-four will be twice as big as it’s ever been!” This is for all Latinos! This is for Vinny! This is for Fernando!”

My father and I ended up in front of the Commerce Center, where we met three cousins ​​from his side of the family.

Among them were Susana and Diego, the eldest and youngest children of my Tío Santos. They carried a banner with images of Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Kiké Hernández and Max Muncy that read, “Happy Heavenly Birthday Santos.”

My Tío Santos was a diehard Dodgers fan who died of a heart attack in early September. At his funeral, my cousins ​​displayed an Ohtani jersey next to his casket. Friday, the day of the Dodgers’ official parade and Fernando Valenzuela’s birthday, mi tío would have been 77.

‘Excited’ doesn’t even cut it, Gus,” Susana told me. “There is no word in the dictionary that could describe the joy my father would have felt today. But a Dodgers championship was just what it should be.”

Dodgers fans set off fireworks Wednesday to celebrate the Los Angeles Dodgers’ victory over the New York Yankees in Game 5 of the World Series.

(Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times)

Two hours after the final, the fireworks were still going off as my father and I left. People were still arriving.

In other parts of Los Angeles, the scene was much uglier. Crowds have broken into or destroyed shops in the city center. In Echo Park, idiots tagged a Metro bus before setting it on fire and burning it to the base. Incidents like these will lead to media coverage that gives even more support to those who insist that LA is a hellhole that cannot be saved.

Those won’t be my memories. What my father and I experienced on Whittier Boulevard was LA at its best. I have never seen people so happy, so relatively calm, so united. They burst with joy, and no blockage would stop them.

We walked via Amalia to Olympic, where we had parked. Atlantic was eerily quiet. Tape blocked almost everything, including a Shell station that has been a focal point for festivities in the past. My father had been looking forward to it bandas played there while people danced in front of gas pumps.

“They took away the tradition!” he said in Spanish in disgust. ‘Where is the banda? Those are the things we need for that la raza can enjoy.”

A rocket exploded above us.

“Sometimes yes is Our fault,” Papi shrugged. “It’s all possible.”

We’re going overboard.

Fireworks sounded again. He was smiling now.

“Oh yes!”