DETROIT -- Snow flurries were falling here and there Wednesday afternoon as Dan Dickerson returned a phone call. It was the latest throwback to winter in a week-long stretch that reminded everyone mid-April weather in Michigan is unpredictable.

The Tigers would’ve had a night game against the Yankees scheduled, and it would’ve been a frigid night for baseball. But like many Tigers fans, Dickerson longs for the days when weather was the only thing determining whether the Tigers would be able to play.

Dickerson hopes to have games to call this season, and big plays among them. If they have to wait until later in the year, he can be patient. The favorite calls of his Tigers broadcasting career, now going on his 21st season calling Tigers games on WXYT, are generally from that time of year anyway.

“My favorite games were the two Justin Verlander Game 5s in Oakland in back-to-back years,” said Dickerson, referring to the deciding games of the 2012 and 2013 AL Division Series. Verlander pitched a four-hit shutout with 11 strikeouts at the Coliseum to decide the 2012 series. A year later, he tossed eight scoreless innings on two hits with a walk and 10 strikeouts, helping the Tigers rally from a 2-1 series deficit.

“Those crowds, I still think outside of Boston [in the 2013 ALCS] were the loudest I've heard in the season,” Dickerson reminisced. “And he just shut them down. I love those games so much.”

Dickerson has a soft spot for starting pitching performances in the playoffs. When the Tigers made their run to the World Series in 2006, he remembers a 41-year-old Kenny Rogers tossing 7 2/3 scoreless innings with eight strikeouts in Game 3 of the Division Series against the Yankees, a team for which he pitched in the playoffs a decade earlier. It was the first postseason baseball in Detroit in 19 years.

“That was cool, just because he'd had no success against them, the individuals in that lineup,” Dickerson said. “And he channeled old Kenny. He was so fired up. He was so animated.”

Of course, there’s the Magglio Ordonez home run off Oakland’s Huston Street in Game 4 of the 2006 ALCS to send the Tigers to their first World Series in 22 years. That might be the call to which he’s forever linked.

“That still gives me chills,” Dickerson said, “just because the friggin’ stadium was shaking. Just the joy that brought and the celebration that ensued, that was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. But literally I remember the stadium shaking as he rounded the bases. I was anticipating a single.”

That’s no offense to Ordonez. That was just his hitting style. If he needed a clutch hit, he was just as likely to take a pitch to the opposite field for a single or double.

The favorite regular-season call for Dickerson also was a walk-off homer from that 2006 season, but a couple months earlier. When Ivan Rodriguez took Indians rookie reliever Roberto Hernandez -- known back then as Fausto Carmona -- deep on Aug. 5 of that season, the Tigers moved to a season-high 38 games over .500. They won their next two games, not in quite so dramatic fashion, to reach 40 games over .500 with a 10-game lead in the AL Central.

The Twins rallied from there, of course, but for that weekend, the Tigers seemed invincible. And Dickerson broke out a new home-run call.

“That was my ‘Deep into the Night’ call, which I'd never broken out before,” he said. “I just remember that feeling. It got to the point where they were going to find a way to win every night, and the ballpark was so alive. When he hit that home run, it was going just bonkers. It feels fresh in my mind, because at that point they felt unbeatable.”

He hopes to feel that energy in a ballpark again one of these days -- the sooner, the better.