A friend sent me the link late last night, Abu Dhabi time.

Vin Scully would “make an announcement” before today’s Dodgers game with the Cincinnati Reds.

And, of course, anytime Vinny makes an announcement, considering that he’s 82 … it freaks out all Vinny-o-philes.

Well, we can all exhale. Scully plans to do another year in the broadcast booth with the Dodgers. Same terms as in recent years. All home games, all National League West road games.

Great. Fantastic. Good news for greater Los Angeles, a place that can use some good news. (It could get better only if he got to work for a new owner.)

The only people in L.A. who don’t love Vinny are that handful who hate baseball or have never heard him. Wait. I take that back. You can hate baseball and still love Vinny.

Vinny is just about the only idea/person/concept that everyone in Los Angeles can agree upon.

“Vinny = good.” Dependable, lyrical, familiar, comforting, intelligent. Vinny, John Wooden, Chick Hearn … the three grand old men of SoCal sports. And now only Vinny is left.

Not that he has been around for a long time, or anything, but I can remember my grandmother drifting off to sleep while listening to Vinny doing Dodgers home games on the radio. And she died in 1966.

Even then, he had been in the game something like 16 years. He was elected to the Hall of Fame’s broadcast wing in 1982, or before two of my three children were born. And all of them are out of college.

I can remember listening to the final innings of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game against the Cubs in 1965.  Vinny calling it, and me sitting in the kitchen. And who in Los Angeles who was older than 10 can ever forget his dramatic announcement, in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 1 of the 1988 World Series: “Look who’s comin’ up!” Referring to the injured Kirk Gibson, who was just about to make Dodgers history with a game-winning home run off of Dennis Eckersley.

Vinny has been sort of the soothing background music (“noise” certainly doesn’t tell it) to about three generations of Angelenos.

I have been lucky enough to interview Vinny a time or three,  and he is relentlessly kind, always patient. He has been asked the same questions thousands of times now — he’s 82, after all, and how many times do you think he’s heard, “Who was your favorite ballplayer?”

Vinny was asked, at the stadium today, about 2012, but he’s too wise to go there. As I have written on this blog before, Vinny likes to say, when asked about his future, “You know how to make God smile? Tell him your plans.”

Well, God may or may not be smiling, but Dodgers fans certainly are.