It’s like déjà vu all over again.
One Yankees fan is celebrating his family’s own pinstripe legacy — as he has recreated an image that ran on the front page of the Post in 1981 of him as an infant posing in a Bronx bomber’s sweatsuit with his mom at that year’s final World Series game against the Dodgers.
Howie Stephens saved the 43-year-old old outfit and dusted it off for the adorable new shot of him with his own daughter Vivienne, 4, whose stuffed bear is wearing the same tiny outfit from four decades ago as the team once again faces off against their rival from Los Angeles.
“It was great taking him there in his little warm-up suit. Everybody wanted to see him. He was so cute,” Stephens’ mother, Kathleen Thomas, 76, recalled to The Post about bringing her three-week-old son to the history-making series.
Thomas, her newborn and her husband had sat high up in the nosebleeds at Yankee Stadium to watch the Bronx Bombers take on the Dodgers on Oct. 28, 1981 for the final game of the coast-to-coast series. Unfortunately, the team lost, in what would be their last trip to the series until 1996.
The Post first met the young family in a crowd of thousands who were waiting in line outside the old Yankee Stadium for the World Series tickets, which Thomas scored for an estimated $15 each — a steal compared to the jaw-dropping minimum $1,113 price for the 2024 series.
The air was brisk and the stadium was filled with near-constant boos and groans, but little Stephens, gussied up in a teensy Yankees sweatsuit, mostly slept soundly as the Dodgers slaughtered the Yankees in a fate-deciding 9-2 game.
“We weren’t at a winning game that day and we were in the nose bleeds section, and it didn’t even matter because we were all there together,” Thomas recalled.
Just months after the disappointing game, the family packed up and moved to Dodgers territory — but has remained loyal to the Yankees for the last five decades.
The Yankees are more than just a sports team for the Napa resident. The team has grown to represent the five short, but life-changing years she spent living in the Big Apple.
New York is where she met her husband, Matt, got married and started their family of seven. They didn’t have much money at the time, but spent what little they could spare going to Yankee games as often as they could.
“It’s just that feel of family when you’re sitting in the stands,” Thomas, a retired state public health nurse, recalled.
“Most of my life wasn’t involved in sports, but those five years were. Now my husband’s died, and so that’s part of my heart. It’s what I left in New York — when we stood up at Yankees and listened to Frank Sinatra singing ‘New York, New York.’ That song comes on the radio, I’m right back there again.”
The 2024 Yankees-Dodgers matchup provided the perfect opportunity for a moment of nostalgia — and Stephens, now all grown up, dusted off the little Yanks sweatsuit to the iconic New York Post cover, this time taking his mother’s place and posing with his now-4-year-old daughter.
Vivienne — 4 years old and too big to fit into the infant sweatsuit — instead adorned a favorite teddy in the Yanks gear for the occasion. She had worn the suit once herself to commemorate two-months-post birth.
“It just brings up that memory of taking the subway out to Yankee Stadium to stand in line and get tickets … It brings back that period of time in which my little guy was little and we were going to a ball game. How many people get to live in New York and experience that?” Thomas said.
Unlike nearly 50 years ago, Thomas plans to cheer on the Yanks for the 2024 World Series in the comfort of her Napa home — with her sprawling family at her side.
While most are California-born, they’ll all be rooting for the Yankees, Thomas assured.
“When they’re together, they’re like little bundles of happiness, so it’ll be fun to have them around in a game. I can’t wait — I’m very excited.”
