My father died six weeks before the Broncos beat the Packers in the 1998 Super Bowl. (My nephew and I, watching those tense final seconds together, were convinced it was Ralph, intervening from … well, wherever he was … who really knocked down that last Brett Favre pass, not John Mobley.)

Ralph Moore never saw the Denver Nuggets win an NBA title, either. He died in 1997 as one of the very few people who could honestly say he had followed Denver’s professional hoop dreams all the way back to the Nuggets’ first season in the NBA. And don’t listen to those whippersnappers and East Coast media interlopers who tell you that year was 1976. It was 1949, when the Nuggets started out 0-15, finished 11-51 and then just … dropped out of the NBA.

When the American Basketball Association was founded in 1967, my father was the Denver Post sports writer assigned to cover the Denver Larks, who quickly changed their name to the Denver Rockets, who in 1974 changed their name back to Nuggets. That was in anticipation of the coming merger with the NBA, which already had the Houston Rockets. Ralph covered the team from Byron Beck and Julian Hammond (my mom called him “Julie”) to Bill Hanzlik and Alex English. In between, there were Spencer Haywood, George McGinnis, Ralph Simpson and one of the most spectacular flameouts in all of sports: David “The Skywalker” Thompson. He was Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan.

As the father of eight and holder of four (season tickets), Ralph often towed a line of us behind him throughout the underbelly of the team’s old haunts in the Auditorium Arena and McNichols Sports Arena. We were a sight. And we saw … all of it. Ralph called his first five boys his starting five and me his sixth man. (But in truth, I was more like the team scorekeeper.)

After each game, it was back to The Denver Post, where Dad would write up his stories for the next day’s afternoon edition while we wee ones annoyed the heck out of his Post sports writer colleagues.

Growing up around the Nuggets came with its own responsibilities, and we all had a role to play. The Nuggets won their first eight games as an NBA team and opened that magical 1976-77 season with a 16-game home winning streak. Which meant that my brother Kevin had to stand outside the Nuggets’ locker-room and ask for Coach Brown’s autograph after every home game until the Celtics finally ended the streak two months later, on the day after Christmas.

Coach’s orders. (This is a true story.)

Larry Brown was a superstitious coach – and a stylish creature of habit often called “The Modfather.” When Kevin randomly asked for Coach’s autograph after the victorious home opener, Brown made their exchange a non-negotiable part of his post-game routine. Seriously: Brown would stop at the locker-room door after each win and ask, “Where’s Ralph’s kid?” Now, I can’t swear to the truth of this next part, but when some in my family tell the story today, they say there were games during the winning streak when Kevin was back at home doing his school work, so Danny or I would take his place. And Brown never knew the difference. Which is understandable. It’s not like anyone bothered much to tell us apart. One neighbor lady who bought my flower seeds and chocolate bars called me “No. 8” for 14 years.

“Growing up Nuggets” defined our childhood. It made us feel privileged, even though Dad never made more than $30,000 a year in his 34 years at The Denver Post. Standing among athletic giants, we had a knee-eye view to every significant milestone in Denver basketball history. My oldest sister, Kate, is still angry with Spencer Haywood for ditching us after one glorious season in 1969-70 to get a head start on the NBA. She made a banner and taped it up under our seating section in the Auditorium Arena. It read: “Spencer Haywood is a Fickle Pickle.” My father asked her to take it down, “but I started leaking tears,” she said. (It occurs to me now that, exactly 30 years later, her grandson had an almost identical response to Carmelo Anthony’s decision to leave Denver for the Knicks.)

We loved it all, but we loved those flashy ABA days of 1967-76 the best. The three-point shot. The red, white and blue ball. The superfly afros that grew out to the rafters. That first-ever slam-dunk contest between David Thompson and Julius Erving. Thompson’s 73-point game. Julius Keye’s seven-point play against Utah. Alex English’s silky-smooth shot. The witch’s curse.

Oh, you haven’t heard about the 1975 ABA Western Division Finals between the Nuggets and the underdog Indiana Pacers? In a brazen act of showmanship even for those crazy ABA days, the Pacers hatched a marketing plan for the ages. They hired a new mascot for the playoffs and secreted him to Denver, where just before the Game 2 tipoff, “Dancin’ Harry” emerged onto the court and placed a garish hex on the Nuggets, to the complete surprise and bemusement of the overflow crowd of 7,491.

And it worked. The Pacers won 131-124, evening the series. So, when it returned to Denver still tied for a critical Game 5, the Nuggets produced Robota, the so-called “Wicked Witch of the West,” to put a pregame spell on the Pacers. (Which, to be honest, was pretty much just Spock’s Vulcan Salute). She also placed a special curse on Pacers star (and future Nugget) George McGinnis, using a life-sized cutout of Big George and a smoking cauldron at mid-court. There was a lot more cursing nonsense throughout the game, but it was all for naught. The Pacers won in a blowout, and eventually won the series in seven. But talk about a show.

Revisionists would have you believe our city’s basketball past is a desert, but Denver made the playoffs every year they were in the ABA. They made the NBA playoffs in nine consecutive seasons and every year from 2004-13. And we were hard-core fans from the start. I still have my scrapbook with entire pages dedicated to Dave Robisch, Fatty Taylor, Ralph Simpson, Bobby Jones, Mack Calvin and others.

But school always was our (involuntary) priority. Ralph never let us forget about the Denver player who literally could not sign his own name on his contract. Instead, he signed an X. “Let that be a lesson,” Dad said. Still is.

But priorities totally blew on the night the Nuggets had a chance to clinch the 1976 ABA championship against the New Jersey Nets. We totally missed it. Not only was I made to appear as George Washington in my regrettably scheduled Shrine of St. Anne’s grade-school play, my two displeased next-oldest brothers were made to come watch me.

Just as I was about to start my big song, “The Cherry Tree Chop,” I could hear — well, everyone could hear — a tortured scream from brother Danny that pierced the quiet.

“Webster missed?!” he yelled.

Danny had been furtively listening to the game on his transistor radio. At that moment, I knew no details, but I knew my Nuggets had lost. My heart was cherry-tree chopped.

Going through my father’s interview tapes after he died was like reliving the history of the team and my family. Ralph recorded the historic news conference in 1975 announcing that the team had acquired the rights to Thompson. But pulling off that historic deal was so huge, it meant the team had to be sold to owners with deeper pockets just so they could afford Thompson’s record salary, which was only about $500,000. The team now had a new name, a new arena and the expectation of winning 60 games every year. So when the floor was opened for questions, General Manager Carl Scheer went straight to my Dad, the gentleman dean of basketball writers. He had not a question but a comment.

Ralph called it the greatest day in team history because he knew landing a player of Thompson’s caliber would hasten a merger with the big-dog NBA – and it did. He stood before team management and publicly thanked them for bringing a winning formula to the Mile High City. Now this blatant act of sentiment and homerism would make (some of) my colleagues today cringe. But it was no more out of place for the times than smoking cigarettes in the office.

Things were just very different then. So was the role of the media.

When Dad found out about the drug abuse that would drive Thompson out of town — and eventually into prison — he wanted to report the real reason this great star who once averaged 27.2 points a game would, by 1982, be putting up only 14.9. Not to shame him. Dad thought reporting the story would force management to get him help, and maybe rescue his spiraling career.

Talk about a different era: Ralph’s Denver Post sports editor told him whatever Thompson was doing off the court was his own business. (Can you imagine that today?) The story never ran, and it haunted my father for years.

After Ralph died, I started going through boxes of his interviews, barely preserved on fragile cassette tapes. I found one from the day in 1977 when Danny and Kevin put me up to calling Dad while he and a stripling named Woody Paige were guests on a KOA sports-talk radio show. I called in and asked, without identifying myself, “Ralph: If the season were to start today, who would be the starting five?”

Without missing a beat, he responded, “Well, John — Oh, if I’m not mistaken, that’s my youngest son …” to which host Al Albert immediately cracked back: “Don’t you talk to your son at home?”

Dad dutifully rattled off five names – David Thompson, Dan Issel, Bobby Jones, Mack Calvin and Jimmy Price – and I was allowed a follow-up:

“Mom wants to know when you’re going to be home for dinner.”

I was at the party at Ball Arena on Monday to watch the Nuggets complete their historic sweep of the Lakers, and I don’t even have to imagine what seeing the Nuggets advance to the NBA Finals for the first time would have meant to him. I know.

The voice of Pat Bowlen shouting “This one’s for John,” wafted through my head, but what I was hearing was, “This one’s for Ralph.”

An earlier version of this column was published in The Denver Post in 2009.