In a League of Their Own : Celebration: Beginning at 5:30 a.m., Northridge team gets the star treatment, with a radio interview, a trip to Disneyland and a hometown parade.

For most of the past month, the 14 members of the Northridge Little League team have lived like celebrities in the odd world where fantasy and reality intersect.

The boys got a healthy dose of both Monday--a day that dawned with stretch limousines, unfolded on the idealized streets of Disneyland and ended on the suburban boulevards of Northridge.

At Disneyland, the boys were showered with ticker tape and a host of Disney characters danced around their red, white and blue float as it glided silently down Main Street USA. In Northridge, the boys were baked by sun and waved limply from showroom-new convertibles as a procession of Los Angeles city vehicles wound around waiting traffic.

Welcome home.

The day started early for the boys, who won the national Little League title, but lost the World Series 4-3 Saturday to a team from Maracaibo, Venezuela.

Even before a gray dawn swallowed the nighttime stars, the players gathered at their home diamond on Devonshire Street to clamber into white stretch limousines that whisked them in grand style to a radio interview.

“I feel great,” player Matt Cassel shouted at 5:30 a.m. as the rest of the team, parents and siblings huddled together, anticipating the day ahead.

The parents, who had previously threatened to postpone the festivities for fear their offspring would be too tired to enjoy it, grudgingly admitted they had underestimated youthful stamina.

“If these guys had to go to school today, they would be tired,” said Debbie Dunlap, mother of pitcher Nathaniel Dunlap. “Now none of them are sleepy.”

Backup outfielder Michael Frost, 12, settled into the posh cabin of a white stretch limousine, filled with the interesting gadgets of luxury. “Wow, this is awesome in here,” he said.

The team arrived at the KRTH radio station just before 7 a.m. Monday morning for the Robert W. Morgan morning show. As the team members were interviewed by disc jockey Morgan, their families listened to the live broadcast from the studio and joined in by cheering them on, waving banners and even dancing to the oldies tunes played by the station.

Both Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda and Mayor Richard Riordan called in to the station, offering their congratulations.

Nathaniel, who broke his thumb in two places in the final game, was the first to be interviewed. He told listeners that his mother “yelled pretty loud” from the bleachers during the series.

“I was yelling, ‘Hit the ball!’ or ‘Throw it!’ ” Debbie Dunlap added. “He handles the pressure much better than I do.”

Off the air, before Manager Larry Baca was interviewed by disc jockey Morgan, he said in his reserved manner, “I need a couple of beers for this.”

“You must be the coolest manager in history,” Morgan responded.

Greg Frost, father of Michael Frost, sang and laughed through the whole broadcast.

“I never played (baseball) half as good as he did,” said the elder Frost about his son. “I am just living through him right now.”

The onslaught of media attention, which began in earnest last week when Northridge first appeared headed for the championship game, has been overwhelming for the boys.

“It feels funny,” said Matt Cunningham. “It feels like you’re in the pros.”

And just like the pros, the boys found that celebrities have little control over their time. As soon as the morning broadcast wrapped up, they were herded into another set of waiting limos that ferried them to a 10:30 a.m. ticker-tape parade at Disneyland.

Not that they were complaining.

As family members waited for the boys to come down Main Street on their own float, Lynn Wallis reminisced about the number of times she has come to the happiest place on Earth with her family.

“We always came once a year,” said Wallis, whose son Gregg plays third base for the team. “We always watch these parades, but I never imagined we would be in one.”

“It is the thrill of a lifetime for them to be in a Disneyland parade,” Wallis said.

The thrill of a lifetime came on the heels of the disaster of a lifetime. Like many of the team’s families, the Wallises were displaced from their Northridge home in the Jan. 17 earthquake. They will be the last to move back in, which they hope to do in the next few weeks.

The Disneyland marching band and cheerleaders led the boys down Main Street as the tune of “Under the Sea” blared from well-hidden speakers. Disney characters danced around the float, and crowds lined the street to cheer their “hometown heroes.”

“We had them on TV at work and they played great,” said Cyndi Andrade, 31, of West Covina, who happened on the parade during a visit to the Magic Kingdom with her husband, Rudy, and her two children. “We saw all the upsets and the excitement.

“The thing about this team was that they had a lot of support from their hometown,” she said as confetti from the parade blew around her and her daughter Vanessa, 9. “It gives them the sense of being something, somebody special.”

Several Disneyland rides and another rushed trip across Los Angeles brought the team back to Northridge by 4 p.m. for a decidedly less showy parade. A few hundred well-wishers gathered in clumps--mostly in the shade--along Reseda Boulevard and Devonshire Street to welcome the boys home.

Letters on a grocery store sign normally used to promote specials on squash and chicken breasts were rearranged to read: “Congratulations Northridge All-Stars.” But some of those on the street had no idea the parade was coming.

Jory Woods, 19, was just waiting for a bus. A Yale University student visiting his mother in Northridge, Woods said it was hard for him to get excited about the Little Leaguers’ accomplishments.

“I’ve only been here two months,” he said. “It’s kind of difficult to feel any kind of hometown pride because I can’t really call this home. It doesn’t really matter to me.”

Others, however, did want to share the boys’ victory. Dan Desautels of Chino was a boy when the Granada Hills Little League team won the World Series in 1963. “I remember 1963 and I wanted to catch some of that same excitement,” he said.

As parades go, the Northridge affair was not much: a high school marching band, a few city fire trucks, a couple of police motorcycles and some sporty convertibles donated by a local car dealership. But what it lacked in glitz, it made up for in genuine feeling.

Ordinary folks gathered on an ordinary street to welcome their extraordinary boys.

“Welcome home,” they shouted and wrote on homemade signs. And as the procession slowly passed, most of the crowd followed on foot to the team’s home field to cheer them and to shake their hands.

Sometimes reality is better than fantasy.