It’s Opening Day today at Fenway Park, and the fabled “Impossible Dream” 1967 American League pennant-winning Red Sox will be honored.

I wasn’t at Fenway for the ’67 Boston opener, but I was on hand two days later, April 14, when the Sox were in New York for Opening Day at Yankee Stadium. Boston’s 3-0 victory was one of the most famous games in Sox history. Billy Rohr, a 21-year-old left-hander making his first major league appearance, came within one pitch of hurling a no-hitter.

I was 23, a Columbia University journalism student. I’d never heard of Rohr. But I was well aware of his catcher, Russ Gibson, 27, who, after years in the minors, also was making his big league debut. We both were from Fall River. He was a three-sport standout at Durfee High, a classmate of my brother, Arthur.

Yankee Stadium had been spruced up and painted white. Some other changes: According to The New York Times, manager Ralph Houk, hoping to eliminate distractions, ordered a TV and phone removed from the players’ lounge. And, 40 years later, ponder this: The Times also would report it was now common for batters to use golf gloves and “several players from each team wear them regularly.” Recently, in 2007, The Times ran a feature on the few players today who don’t wear such gloves.

Attendance at the 1967 game was 14,375. Jacqueline Kennedy and her son, John, age 6, sat near the Boston dugout.

I went with my wife, Elizabeth — well, we’d be married in two months — and our friend Marsha Hurst of Newton, Mass. They were both seniors at Brown.

Our third-deck tickets were $1.50. (Today they’re $20.)

When we took our seats, the two women surprised me by unfurling a hand-lettered bedsheet they’d smuggled in. It said, “Fall River says Go Sox.”

Rohr, of course, was terrific, but the most memorable image of the game is something you’ve seen countless times in highlight films: a sensational leaping, somersaulting catch by left fielder Carl Yastrzemski to preserve the no-hitter at the start of the 9th.

Rohr then got the next batter and now if he could just dispatch Yankee catcher Elston Howard the no-hitter would be his.

I wish I could find a piece about this game I did for a magazine-writing class at Columbia. It was in the breezy style of a New Yorker Talk of the Town item.

I remember stating that at this point in the game, Sox manager Dick Williams visited Rohr on the mound to calm him down.

Which, I learn from microfilm, is not the spin The Times had. The paper said Williams went “to remind Rohr that Howard often swings at the first pitch” and that he should throw it outside into the dirt. Well, that would be a form of calming Rohr down, no?

The count ran to 3 and 2. One more strike would do it. But Howard lined a single to right field. I had a chance to chat with Russ Gibson in 1982. He said Howard hit a hanging curve. (Later in ’67 Howard would play for the Sox.)

Despite this incredible start, Rohr’s career fizzled. Including a win for Cleveland in 1968, he was 3 and 3 lifetime.

My record with no-hitters remains spotty. In 2001, I was at Fenway as the Yanks’ Mike Mussina came within one pitch of a no-hitter — indeed a perfect game.

And then at Fenway in 2002, Boston’s Derek Lowe did pitch a no-hitter, against Tampa Bay.

And I had a ticket.

But I sold it because I was going to a Columbia reunion.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

Follow the ’67 season day by day and see photos of the players on projo.com/redsox

mbakst@projo.com