All right. Contrary to what I promised myself when I first began weaving a weekly yarn for this newspaper 20 years ago, I am about to date myself.

I don’t mean that literally — although I did spend much of my teenage years dating myself. What I’m referring to is a story I did in my second year of television sports at KPIX in San Francisco.

It was in 1969 (Yes. I started in sports television when I was 6 years old), and the then-San Francisco Warriors were owned by a creative cherub of a man named Franklin Mieuli.

Franklin was P.T. Barnum in a deerstalker hat. He understood how to sell his product, and how to put bodies in seats. The team played its home games at the Cow Palace, and often times the horned denizens the place was named after outnumbered the paid attendance.

Franklin also knew how to get publicity, which in turn generated interest in his team. To that end, in the 1969 NBA draft, with his 13th pick (yes, there were 13 rounds back then), Mieuli selected Denise Long, a 5’11” scoring machine from Whitten, Iowa.

Long had scored 6,250 points in her high school career at Union Whitten. They were also the Iowa state champions. The town of Whitten has a population of 200. There were 34 students in the graduating class. Long was the most talked about thing in the state, this side of the corn harvest.

When she and a high school teammate were brought to San Francisco, they were heralded in the same way that Barnum heralded Jumbo the Elephant.

Denise Long got to meet Wilt Chamberlain, then a Warrior “teammate,” Willie Mays, the mayor and every other politician who wanted his picture in the paper with anybody he or she could.

Denise Long never played for the Warriors, but Franklin Mieuli did build a woman’s team that lasted for one year and featured Denise Long.

She never saw the court as a Warrior because the then-enlightened NBA Commissioner, J. Walter Kennedy vetoed the draft pick by saying the NBA didn’t draft non-college players. He didn’t add….”or women.”

All of this came back to me in a blinding flash when I began thinking about the impact the Golden State Valkyries have had on this community some 57 years later.

Denise Long was a good shooter. Period. Maybe she might have been first off the bench for a West Coast Conference team were she to be playing in today’s game, but any thought that she might have so much as sniff at making a WNBA team would be like me saying “I think I can score on Victor Wembanyama.”

If the truth be told, I couldn’t score on a single player in the WNBA, and I’m talking about back in the day when I actually knew how to bounce the ball. That’s how good the league is, and how far the women’s game has come.

And that’s why I’m a fan of the Valkyries.

The whole story of this team is a phenomenon. A second-year franchise is now about to begin a seven-game series to determine the champion of the best women’s basketball league in the world.

Against all odds, the first year of this franchise saw them get to the playoffs. That’s also unheard of.

The team’s owner, Joe Lacob (who also owns the men’s team that plays in the same building), promised a championship within five years. Understand that Lacob is the master of the over-stated, and he’s about to be somehow shown that every now and then, hyperbole is usurped by reality. This simply is not supposed to be happening.

In the Warriors’ championship years, the team took on the rallying cry  “Just Us.” And it worked. Well, that cry has now taken up residency down the hall in the locker room of the Valkyries — and it’s working again.

Let’s begin with the coaching. They say that the NBA is a “player’s league,” and in many cases that’s true. But the WNBA is a coaches’, league, and all you have to look at to prove it, are the teams that got this far.

I always said this about Tara VanDerveer at Stanford, and I’ll say it about Natalie Nakase with the Valkyries — those two people can flat out coach. And I mean at any level. Men, women, college or professional. Natalie Nakase prepares her team to play a game as well as anyone I’ve ever been around.

The Valks are the sum of the parts. Yes, they have a few players who could play for anyone in the league. But there’s a real “we” kind of feel about this team. They play within a system, they generally make the extra pass for the better shot, they’re unselfish. It’s not “I’m gonna get mine,” it’s “we’re gonna get ours.” And how an undersized team can out rebound virtually every opponent is still beyond my comprehension.

And then there’s Ballhalla.

I’m honestly not sure who came up with that description of the Chase Center for a Valkyries’ game, but give them a promotion. We live in an age of hype at a sports event. Quite frankly I don’t really want to be told when to cheer and when to jump out of my seat by head-banging music and a hype-person. The Valkyries have even found a way to make that tolerable. Somehow, the fans create the din that has won games for this team without the overpowering assistance of electronics.

There’s still the hype-person, and stirring music. Still tee shirts being shot into the stands, and fun and games involving the crowd, but for some reason the histrionics, the crowd, and the team all seem to work in sync.

I can tell you that what’s happening here right now is lightning in a bottle. I urge you to grab hold of it.

The team is great, the vibe is great, the place is rockin’.

Denise Long…. and Franklin Mieuli… would give it a standing “O.”

Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native. Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.