THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Sunday, Nov. 6, 2016

When Steve Dunkle was in junior high, growing up in southern California, he had a Chicago Cubs hat he liked to wear.

In one of his classes, the teacher had a rule — no hats in class.

But he wouldn’t take it off. One day, the teacher came up from behind and took it off his head.

He didn’t want to wait until the end of the year to get his hat back.

So after class, he went up to the teacher with a sob story.

“I wonder if I could have my Cubs hat back,” he began. “Andre Dawson gave us that hat (in 1987, when he won the MVP on a last-place club). Andre Dawson gave my dad that hat before my dad died of cancer. I was wondering if I can get that hat back.”

The sympathetic teacher complied, and Steve and his hat went on their way.

About a month later, it was time for parent-teacher conferences.

“I come home from school and my dad goes, ‘so, tell me this story about how I died of cancer,’” Steve said.

SUFFERING, WHETHER it’s been for eight years or for 80, is still suffering.

In Steve Dunkle’s case, his anguish over his beloved Chicago Cubs lasted 32 years, before the north siders on Wednesday won the World Series for the first time in 108 seasons.

The 43-year-old Hayden resident celebrated, his mind running the gamut of emotions — then he had to leave for work, and his 11 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. shift as night foreman at Super 1 Foods in Hayden.

He estimated shaking the hands of 30 to 50 employees and customers during his shift, congratulating him on his team’s Game 7, extra-inning victory over the Cleveland Indians. Fortunately, it was an otherwise quiet night at work.

“I was happy, it was surreal,” Dunkle said. “Did it really happen? Yeah, it happened.”

STEVE DUNKLE’s Cub-fan story began in 1984, when he was a fifth-grader living in Camarillo, Calif.

“Came home from school one day, Oct. 2, 1984, Game 1 of the NLCS against the Padres,” he recalled. “Day baseball, Wrigley Field, 10-year-old boy comes home, gonna put on cartoons, kid shows, whatever, flipping through channels, comes across the game and I was enthralled ... it captured me. I remember very distinctly, Cubs won 13-0, Rick Sutcliffe hit a grand slam and somebody threw a smoke bomb at Tony Gwynn in right field. Big purple smoke bomb.”

A Cubs fan was born.

Before that, he was a baseball fan, kinda/sorta a Dodger fan, living some 60 miles north of L.A. As it turned out, earlier that season he had attended a Dodgers-Cubs game at Dodger Stadium. Sutcliffe was the losing pitcher — his only loss in an eventual Cy Young-winning season.

It just wasn’t Wrigley Field.

“Day baseball ... the ivy, they were talking about how it had been 39 years (since the Cubs last made the World Series). My mother was 39 years old at the time — she was born in 1945, the last time they went to the World Series. ... the drought ... 39 years ... the bleacher bums ... just everything.”

The Cubs, of course, lost to the Padres in that NLCS, then lost to the Giants five years later.

In 1992, two weeks after graduating from Rio Mesa High in nearby Oxnard, Calif., Dunkle and his friend Henry Trotter took a Greyhound bus from L.A. to Chicago. They saw five Cubs games at Wrigley, as well as two White Sox games, a Brewers game in Milwaukee, and a Cardinals game in St. Louis.

“The first time I ever walked into Wrigley, I sat in the left field bleachers for the first game,” Dunkle recalled. “That’s where I wanted to sit. I walked in, looked back, the scoreboard was behind me, and it was like home. I’d always been here, because I’d been watching all the games here on WGN. It was like I’d been there.”

In 1988, Dunkle was a freshman in high school when the first night game was played at Wrigley. In one of his classes, students were asked to write a paper about a controversial topic. Others wrote about stuff like abortion, politics ...

Dunkle wrote about the pros and cons of lights at Wrigley Field.

THE CUBS lost to the Giants in the 1989 NLCS. Dunkle suffered along with the rest of Cubs nation through the Bartman fiasco in 2003.

In 2007, Dunkle went back to Wrigley Field. He was still living in southern California; his friend from there, Jordan Taylor, had moved to Hayden. They met up in Chicago for a Cubs game one weekend.

“I do want to go back in two years with my dad, once the stadium is completely renovated. He’s never been to Wrigley. He’s not a Cub fan, he’s a Cardinals fan.”

His mom and dad, Jim and Nita Dunkle, still live in Camarillo and have been married for more than 50 years.

Steve Dunkle moved up to Hayden eight years ago, “just looking for something new to do.”

THE ARRIVAL of general manager Theo Epstein gave Dunkle some hope with the Cubs, as did last year’s surprise appearance in the NLCS.

Working nights and sleeping during the afternoon and early evening, Steve Dunkle was eventually “running on fumes” after getting up “early” to watch the Cubs in the postseason, prior to heading to work.

He went in to work after Game 6, and said it was “impossible to wind down” after getting off shift the next morning. He caught what sleep he could before the alarm went off at 4:45 p.m., 15 minutes before first pitch of Game 7.

Like any good mother, Nita got behind her son’s favorite team, and was texting him throughout the deciding game.

But once the Cubs gave up their 5-1 lead and Cleveland tied it at 6 in the eighth inning, “the texts stopped from her,” Steve said.

Then came the rain delay just before the top of the 10th, and Steve had to think about getting ready for work.

He hopped in the shower and when he got out, Kyle Schwarber was just coming off first base, being lifted for a pinch hitter after leading off with a single that started the two-run uprising that led to the Cubs’ 8-7 victory.

And when first baseman Anthony Rizzo snagged the throw from Kris Bryant for the final out, ending more than a century of frustration for Cubs fans, and more than three decades of agony for Steve Dunkle ...

“It was excitement. It was relief,” he said. “All of a sudden you start thinking of things ... older generations of Cubs fans ...”

After the game, he called his younger sister and only sibling, Leigh Ann, who lives in Simi Valley, Calif.

He saw the stories ... the man who drove from North Carolina to Indiana to listen to Game 7 at his dad’s gravesite ... the guy that had a beer in his fridge for 32 years, and when the Cubs won, he cracked the beer open ...

“Stories of people way longer suffering than me,” Steve said. “32 years is nothing. My thought was (if the Cubs lost), we blew it here, we can wait another year. But this year is next year. It happened.”

The next morning, when he got home from work, Steve Dunkel walked across the street to the Sun Aire Estates, a retirement community in Hayden owned by his friend Jordan Taylor, and hoisted his Cubs’ iconic ‘W’ flag up the flagpole.

ANOTHER TIME in eighth grade, Steve Dunkle said he got into a “scrap” with another student.

It happened between first and second period, and their punishment was suspension for the remainder of the school day.

Steve, who lived close enough to ride his bike to school, got home around noon.

His mom was livid. His dad, Jim, who worked some 5 minutes away, was home for lunch. He was watching the Cubs game on WGN.

“I came in and said, ‘who’s winning the game?’ and my dad says, ‘2-nothin Cubs, they got two in the bottom of the first,’” Steve recalled. “My mother (Nita) reaches over and turns off the remote and says, ‘we’re not here to discuss the Cubs, we’re here to discuss your fighting.’ And my dad said, ‘boys will be boys,’ and turned the TV back on.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.