The jubilant San Francisco Giants paraded down a euphoric Market Street on Wednesday and Owen Creese of San Jose absolutely had to be there. After all, like so many in the throng, he’d waited his whole life to see the Giants crowned champions and celebrate in a giddy love-fest amid a shower of ticker tape.

Oh yeah, Owen Creese is all of 11 months old. But there was no way his mom, wearing a black Tim Lincecum T-shirt, and his dad, in Giants jersey, were going to let him miss this for the world.

“Baseball, it’s kind of transcendent in time,” says Jeff Creese, 32, an IT analyst who took the day off from Cisco to join the mob. “We could be living near San Francisco for the rest of our lives and we might not see another Giants World Series.”

True. And so he and Nicole Creese, 31, a nurse at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, captured the end of Owen’s first baseball season on video. They will tell him the stories — over and over again, no doubt. And chances are a baseball fan — a Giants baseball fan — will be born.

This is how it happens. It was apparent up and down Market Street that baseball fandom can be handed down like the color of our eyes or the shapes of our noses. Baseball fandom, with its heartbreak and joy and its natural tendency to be shared among a tribe, is something our elders give to us. For that, we never forget them.

They say there is no crying in baseball, but in the days since the Giants beat the Texas Rangers for the world championship plenty of tears have been shed — tears of joy in victory, and bittersweet tears at the memories of loved ones alive and no longer alive who showed us the way.

Eric Victoria stood on Market near 6th Street as parade-goers spontaneously broke into a chant of “Let’s Go Giants.” On his shoulders, beaming, was his 8-year-old son, also Eric Victoria. Sure, the elder Victoria had memories of baseball with his dad.

“Sometimes my dad like just surprised us,” says Victoria, 31, of Manteca. “He wouldn’t tell us where we were going. We’d jump in the car and just drive. And then we’d pull up to the ballpark.”

Those were the Candlestick days. It didn’t matter who the Giants were playing or even how the team was doing.

“It was being at the ballpark, watching the game, cheering on the Giants,” says Victoria, whose father was one of the few, from the looks of Market Street, who was at work on Wednesday. Now it’s Victoria’s turn to pass it on.

“My dad got me into baseball,” says the younger Victoria. “So I started watching the Giants.”

Joanne Dana, 47, was on the phone with her dad practically before Brian Wilson’s third-strike pitch hit catcher Buster Posey’s mitt in the clinching game. “My dad is 80 and he’s been a fan since we got here in 1965,” says Dana, of Castro Valley, who stood among the black- and orange-clad crowd with her 10-year-old daughter Rachel and 14-year-old son, Kyle. “I was able to see my dad as happy as he was.”

Leslyn Leong, of Palo Alto, came by her love of baseball through her grandfather, who listened to the Pacific Coast League Hawaiian Islanders on the radio when she was growing up in Hawaii. Her Giants fandom is a product of having settled in the Bay Area and she is now passing that along to her son Ryan, 7, who was headed to a parade spot on Montgomery Street with mom, buddy Aidan Berger, 8, and his mom, Allison Wong.

“I went to a game at Aloha Stadium,” Leong, 47, says thinking about her baseball roots. “I went with my dad. I loved all that.”

And Ryan and Aidan both are into it. Especially this World Series stuff. The boys briefly pondered the enormity of the day. Certainly they knew it would be a long time before anything like a Giants World Series parade happened again. Right?

“Next year,” Aidan says. “They’re going to win.”

Let them dream. Sometimes it’s best not to bring the next generation along too quickly.