asks at the top of his Dodgers broadcast, inviting you in once again as his personal guest. Over 67 years, he has become America’s most trusted storyteller, sports or otherwise, his tales so artfully intertwined with balls and strikes that it feels as if Scully pulls the game’s strings himself.

He is baseball’s omniscient narrator, after all, the voice behind Kirk Gibson’s famous hobbled walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series – “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!” – and baseball’s most infamous World Series gaffe, “It gets through Buckner!” Scully has been a part of each of the Dodgers’ six World Series titles and all four of Sandy Koufax’s no-hitters. His career stretches from Jackie Robinson’s prime in Brooklyn to Clayton Kershaw’s in L.A., an astounding span of almost 10,000 games.

“There’s no way to separate him from the team’s identity,” says Steve Kaminsky, 71, of South Pasadena, a New York transplant and listener for more than 60 years. “Vinny has always been there.”

Scully broadcast his final Dodgers home game Sunday. On Oct. 2, 2016, the magical 67-year run of broadcasting’s most beloved voice will come to an end in San Francisco. Just shy of his 88th birthday, Scully will bid the baseball world adieu, and fans far and wide, young and old, will collectively mourn. In Los Angeles, the most loyal of Scully’s listeners liken his departure to losing a family member.

To Beverly Hills

Larry King was 16 years old when he heard the voice from the bulky set of his transistor radio. Even then, he remembers being drawn in. From the living room of his current home in Beverly Hills, he’s transported back to that afternoon in 1950 – his family’s tiny Brooklyn apartment, the crackle of the radio, and Dodgers announcer Red Barber with the microphone, handing off to a “young man out of Fordham” for the first time.

“Here,” Barber announced, “is the voice of Vin Scully.”

As a child, King’s only reference to his beloved Dodgers was Barber’s voice. His father died suddenly of a heart attack in June 1943 when he was just 9. And in the years that followed, King’s family was the poorest on his block. Baseball tickets were an uncommon luxury, so he dreamed of the crisp white lines and fresh green grass of Ebbets Field.

The radio had been a Hanukkah present from his mother, soon after his father’s death, and King often lugged the 40-pound set around on his shoulders, hanging on Barber’s every word, imitating his voice to strangers.

It was in this imaginative world that Scully flourished. He described scenes in detailed brush-strokes, paying special care to nuance – the tug of a pitcher’s collar or sweat wiped from a batter’s forehead. In 1953, he called a World Series at just 25 years old, and the next season, took over full-time as voice of the Dodgers. Like his predecessor, Scully was a natural storyteller, and in the transistor radio, he found his perfect medium – an open stoop, on which he could sling his press-box poetry.

The Dodgers won their first World Series in 1955, and as left-hander Johnny Podres induced the final ground out of a Game 7 shutout, King burst through the door of his apartment. The sound of Scully’s voice poured into the street with him, from transistors across the neighborhood.

In that moment, Scully’s voice seemed to ring down from on high: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared, “the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.” The call set off a celebration; the entire borough had been waiting for him to confirm. When the Dodgers moved west in 1958, Angelenos would feel the same, distrusting their own eyes, until Vin had said it was true.

“Baseball announcers were a part of you then,” King remembers. “They were your lifeblood. There aren’t many like that anymore.”

As the transistor’s popularity diminished, the gravitas of baseball’s finest wordsmiths did, as well. Memories of the greats – Barber, Mel Allen, Russ Hodges, Ernie Harwell, each once as famous as the game they announced – have faded. Even King, known for his iconic radio personality, has been forced to adapt. His voice is now heard almost exclusively on Hulu, streamed for millions over the Internet.

“The world really has changed,” he says.

Down the hallway, a collection of sports relics and personal keepsakes, all juxtaposed together, line the halls of a room that’s as much museum as it is family trophy room. Cardboard cutouts from his sons’ little league baseball teams rest near a pair of Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves. Dozens of autographed balls and gloves and shoes are scattered between photos of King with U.S. presidents and celebrities.

Near the door, an original painting of Ebbets Field hangs on its own, and as he offers a rare tour, King stops in front of it. In the first row, behind home plate, there he is, with his Dodger hat and dark-rimmed glasses, painted into the Brooklyn crowd, frozen in time.

In this room, the past breathes with life, but outside, King is constantly reminded of how much time has changed what he once knew. Just to listen to Scully, he switches his television from DirecTV to a second provider, Time Warner, which, due to a TV dispute, he had to buy to even watch the Dodgers. Sometimes, he yearns again for the simplicity of his transistor radio.

King wonders about his youngest sons, Chance and Cannon, and how they’ll remember Scully or the other greats, if they’ll remember at all. He calls Cannon into the room. “What does Vin mean to you?” he asks.

“You hear his voice, and I don’t know,” Cannon says, “there’s just nothing like it.”

Bedtime stories

It’s 9:30 p.m., well past his bedtime, but 8-year-old Jonathan Lobel is still awake, with headphones on, as his mother, Michelle, opens the bedroom door. The jig is up. “It’s the bottom of the eighth!” he begs.

This time, she’ll let it slide. Only a couple more days of summer remain, after all, and in this final season of Scully, what could a few more minutes hurt?

Jonathan is almost certainly the only second-grader in Los Angeles spellbound nightly by Vin’s voice on the transistor radio. Every night, in a room filled with autographed baseballs and bobbleheads, he sets his small, silver radio on his nightstand, slips on black headphones, and closes his eyes, as Scully’s words paint the scene.

The arrangement began as a compromise. Jonathan’s bedtime on school nights meant missing most of the Dodgers broadcast on TV. But as his son grew older, Jonathan’s father worried television was distracting from what, he remembered, made baseball so magical. So Josh Lobel, a hedge fund manager in Beverly Hills, bought his son a transistor radio.

“We live in such a visual culture, and we’ve lost so much magic in the story,” Josh says. “I wanted him to see it all, the way I did listening to Vin.”

Perhaps it sounds contradictory – that only on the radio can we truly “see” – but consider this: Since making their deal, Jonathan’s knowledge of the team has become encyclopedic. On the day backup catcher A.J. Ellis is traded to the Phillies, he conjures statistics out of thin air to analyze the fallout.

There were other signs of Scully’s influence: Players nearly three times Jonathan’s age were suddenly “youngsters.” One night, he announced to the family that a home run was “hit from here to Utica!”

“We realized he was being raised by an 87-year-old for two hours a night,” Josh says.

A second dad

For more than seven hours, Dee Audette sat in a chair at a Hollywood tattoo parlor as an ink portrait of the 80-year-old man she’d come to love, but had never met, began to take shape on her right forearm.

Etched from wrist to elbow was his toothy smile, his perfectly coiffed red hair, and his impeccable suit, shaded black and outfitted with a striped tie. As the needle colored in the contours of his face and the wrinkles in his forehead, Audette only grew more confident. For Vin Scully, a tattoo seemed like the least she could do.

Audette grew up in East L.A., in a small house on Morrow Place, with seven brothers and sisters, too strapped to afford baseball tickets for a family of 10. So every night, they gathered in the living room to watch the Dodgers, and her father, Mike, would turn the television on mute and the radio on high. Together, they reveled in that night’s stories, while she watched from her father’s lap.

Over the years, father and daughter grew close.

When her father died in 2001, the team and Scully became Audette’s sole escape. She bought season tickets and started traveling to the park for nearly every game, like she always promised she would. She began collecting every keepsake she could and stashing it at home.

On opening day of the 2010 season, Scully’s 60th year as the team’s announcer, Audette went to Chavez Ravine determined to finally meet the man whose image she had tattooed on her arm.

As Scully came into view, Audette’s heart raced. He introduced himself, before the sight of his ink-drawn likeness, smiling up from a strange woman’s forearm turned him a bright shade of red.

“Why would you do that for me?” Scully asked her.

“Why would you give up 60 years for us Dodger fans?” she echoed back. He invited her into the press box, and they talked baseball for the better part of an hour.