I am excited about the idea of the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series. And they are one game away now, with three shots at securing their first championship since 1954 — or four years before they moved to San Francisco.

Growing up in Los Angeles, as a Dodgers fan … I spent decades loathing the Giants. I reveled in their misery. Their failures. Their close calls that turned into choke jobs. I clearly remember where I was when Juan Marichal attacked John Roseboro with a bat,  still the weirdest thing I have seen in a baseball game.

And now I hope the Giants will win? Well, yes. Yes, I do.

What happened?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, the past week. Especially since the Giants went up 2-0 on the Rangers and took control of the series.

This is what I’ve come up with:

–Distance makes the heart grow fonder … or the brain more forgetful. When you live on the other side of the world from California, San Francisco no longer seems as remote or weird or freaky. I mean, it is weird and freaky, by suburban SoCal standards, but it barely qualifies as exotic when you live across the Hormuz Strait from Iran … when Yemen is a one-day drive away … when Kabul is closer than Cairo or Istanbul.

San Francisco almost seems like home, when viewed from Abu Dhabi.

–The National League thing. I have always been a National League fan. Always. Always. In every World Series and every All-Star game in my lifetime, I have wanted the National League team to win. With one exception — in 2002, when the Angels played the Giants. Yes,  I didn’t like those Giants, and I really liked those Angels.

–West Coast bias.  A variation on the NL preference. It’s just built in to my psyche. If you live on the West Coast of the United States, you tend to prefer any team from your region in any sport to defeat any team from the other side of the Rockies. (Unless, say, it’s NL vs. AL or NFC vs. AFC.) It’s just how it is. And San Francisco is significantly farther west than is Los Angeles. (Check a globe; Reno is farther west than L.A.)

–The Barry Bonds Factor. Barry is gone. These Giants have nothing to do with the Darth Vader of baseball. OK, he’s sitting in the stands, but his ‘roids-puffed body isn’t in uniform. You can root for the Giants without rooting for Barry. This is big. Call it “fan addition by Barry subtraction.”

–Giants fans. Normally, I loathe them. They are surprisingly rude and crude, which was reinforced to me when most of the media seating for the 2002 World Series, which I covered from beginning to end, was in left field — about 10 feet from Giants fans. Three nights of sitting next to those people … Yes, Dodgers fans are catching up in loutish behavior (and fast, I must confess). But they still are not as bad as the average obscenity-shouting, fight-prone, probably-drunk Giants fan.

Still … still … Giants fans are great baseball fans. They love that team even though it has broken their hearts. I respect that. And their devotion stands in contrast to that of Texas Rangers fans. The Dallas area is about football (NFL), football (college) and football (high school). Then maybe the Dallas Mavericks. Then maybe the Rangers. Maybe. The Giants fans deserve a champion far more than do Rangers fans.

–This Giants team is likable. Built on pitching. Intelligently constructed to take advantage of their home field. A lineup of random guys culled from the baseball bargain bin, few of whom are jerks. They remind me more than a little of the 1988 Dodgers … and the 2002 Angels. Scrappy. Good chemistry. A team having fun. A team that Plays the Right Way.

I know some SoCal baseball people are disgusted by the idea of the Giants’ first World Series triumph in San Francisco. I understand that, too. And I’m fairly certain that somewhere on this very blog, a few years ago, I probably wrote something about how “the Giants could lose every game for 10 years and it would be fine with me.” But that was then. This is Abu-Dhabi-now.

Of course, this isn’t over. Which Giants fans know keenly. Things can go wrong.  Which makes it even more fun to be a casual, perhaps one-shot fan of this team. It absolutely won’t be over until it’s over. And if it ends with the Giants celebrating, I like the idea of San Francisco going crazy. Which it will.