Column: Huddling up for last call to reminisce about L.A. sports moments of 2015

We’re sitting at a big slab of oak at a Little Tokyo watering hole, talking about the L.A. sports pathos — Kobe, Doc, the Dodgers, plus random bar chatter, such as how actors should never leave a hit TV show.

We call it the “David Caruso Rule,” then everyone lists all the actors who left a sure thing to take a stab at their own show — and usually vanished — including the estimable McLean Stevenson. In a nutshell, those career moves summarize the L.A. pathos: swinging from your heels, the three-pointer at the buzzer, the last-gasp flying Hail Mary leap.

Anyway, someone mentions Ramirez Liquor store in Boyle Heights, which carries every possible brand of tequila and serves up an epic burger as well, except that there’s no place to sit, so people take to bringing lawn chairs and creating spontaneous tailgates.

Complicating this otherwise magnificent dining experience is the fact that every once in a while, someone in authority — a security guard, a priest — will wander over to warn you about having an open beer on the premises. Here in L.A., they keep you on a pretty short leash.

These are the moments....

With me are a lot of the usual suspects: Enrique, a hoops stud at Franklin many moons ago, and Edgar, with whom I’m running the L.A. Marathon — “from the stadium to the sea to urgent care.” We haven’t started training yet, though Edgar insists he’s dropped 20 pounds — half of that with a severe haircut that almost makes him look like an adult.

Roth is here too, a UCLA grad who ushered at Dodger Stadium for 10 years. Show me someone who’s survived a decade at Dodger Stadium and I’ll show you a young person with wisdom, maturity, the ability to defuse difficult situations. It’s like 10 years of psych classes.

A server drops another plate of wasabi fries on the table; it wobbles, then settles. And we start to talk with anticipation about Dave Roberts.

Like I started to say, these are the moments — here at Far Bar downtown, or at Sonny McLean’s in Santa Monica, or Tinhorn Flats in Burbank — where the TV games glow like ecclesiastic candles.

These are real places, for guys raised on episodes of “Cheers” who think everyone needs one neighborhood hangout, or a hiking trail, or a bookstore ... a refuge from the workaday concerns of a frantic city where rush hour never ends. Sports as muse. Sports as mistletoe.

On a nearby TV, a punter makes a desperate, sloppy tackle. Everyone cheers.

I bring up the millennials, the oppressed segment in their 20s and early 30s that I am helping to rally into a political force, and how my medical concierge/caddie, Dr. Steve, who teaches at one of the better medical schools, struggles to train his students to deal with failure.

Sooner or later, Dr. Steve says, his brilliant young students will botch a case and completely flip out, having until that moment never failed at anything — soccer, the sousaphone, advanced trig.

Roth, who is a fountain of useless knowledge almost unmatched in this world, cites the episode of “MASH” in which Winchester has a crisis of confidence after a bungled surgery. Good point, and I make a note to pass that reference on to Dr. Steve, who might show that episode to his little gods, making their future a gentler, more forgiving place.

These are the moments — the asides, the chats, the camaraderie of sports that we appreciate at times like these, in seasons such as this, as we huddle up in slice-of-life saloons where we laugh until the windows steam up and the barkeep shouts “last call!”

Last call, L.A. Last call for 2015, which was as rich and festive as a sports season can be, with significant changes to the landscape. Same-old, same-old so bores me. Look for new developments to be excited about. Because I don’t measure sports success merely in banners. I measure it in arguments with friends, and the little false crises that sports gives us: the coaching changes, the trades, the tirades.

Indeed, the L.A. sports landscape is in serious transition in the new year, with newcomers helming the Dodgers and USC, while Kobe and Vinny — please try to remain calm — take a last lap before retiring.

Change is good. Except when it’s just rotten.

Yet, here’s the thing: In a hundred beery think tanks like this, sports draws us together against the strains of the day, and the worries of the night, in arguments that are obtuse, lyrical, silly, serious and randomly wonderful. It is our connective tissue, our common creed, at a time when we seem to have so little else to soothe us.

And, for a few precious moments, we start to feel that everything will turn out OK.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

Twitter: @erskinetimes