We took our three-and-a-half-year-old to her first movie last week. I bought tickets and popcorn and 72-ounce sodas and made it all the way to the threshold of Theater Number Four when she screamed and wept and begged to go home. And so we pried her fingers from the door frame and left. The posters were too scary, she said. The film was “Kung Fu Panda.”

I immediately thought of the first movie I ever saw in a theater: “The Poseidon Adventure”, whose posters bore the tagline: “Hell, Upside Down.” Why my parents thought large-scale nautical death was a suitable subject for a 5-year-old, I cannot say. But I haven’t taken a cruise, celebrated New Year’s or listened to Maureen McGovern since.

After “Poseidon,” I was allowed a brief interval of innocence: A ration of one Disney flick per year – “The World’s Greatest Athlete” in ’73, “Herbie Rides Again” in ’74 and “The Apple Dumpling Gang” in ’75. Then one night in August of that year, while my mother hosted bridge club, my father abruptly announced that he was taking me and my brother Tom out to buy underwear for the upcoming school year. In fact, he took us to the Boulevard Theater in Minneapolis, where we saw “Jaws” — after which I really did need to buy new underwear.

Walking into the Boulevard, I put up a brave front. But my chin began to quiver at the sight of that already-famous poster, tagged: “The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying best seller.” I was duly terrified. From the opening moments, when a dead and naked girl was seen washed up on the beach, I feared Don Knotts and Kurt Russell would not rescue me with Disneyfied highjinks.

My father has always had a strange relationship with movies and – just to annoy his children – pronounces the word theater as “thee-AY-ter.” He sobbed through “Apollo 13″ and “Rudy.” When I took him to see “Lost in Translation”– I told him we were going to buy underwear – he said, during the closing credits, “That was different.” (It reminded me of the time Tom and I surprised him by grilling salmon steaks for him in the backyard. He took one bite and said, “Nice try.”)

Just last week, Dad took three of his grandchildren to see “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl Movie,” based on a popular line of dolls. When I asked him if the kids liked it, he said he thought so. Then he allowed that they were perhaps discomfited by the sight of their 74-year-old grandpa weeping openly throughout the film. “It was set in 1934,” he said, somewhat defensively, over the sound of my horse laughter. “The year I was born. And it brought back so many memories of that time that I . . . I just couldn’t help it.”

I asked him if he was going to send away for his own American Girl dolls, but he didn’t answer. He just told me to p*ss off.

There are few things you can open a can of — beer comes to mind, and whoop-ass — that are quite as satisfying as tennis balls. For starters, they’re the only product I can think of that still come in pull-tab cans.

Both art forms — tennis and pull-tab cans — peaked in the early 1980s and have been in steady decline ever since. So we should be grateful that tennis and pull-tab cans remain committed to one another long after everyone else has abandoned them, for opening that pull-tab can of tennis balls — kusshhh! — creates the same satisfying rush of air that comes with a newly opened can of coffee. (And as with coffee, the accompanying aroma is unmistakable.)

I thought of all of this two weeks ago, when I played tennis for the first time in years, and was surprised by how much I had missed everything about the game — including foraging for balls beneath a pile of leaves in a distant, chain-linked corner of the court and retrieving balls driven over that 12-foot Cyclone fence (and onto an adjacent playground) while trying to imitate George Brett’s swing.

That enthusiasm was renewed yesterday during the men’s final at Wimbledon, where tennisy titans Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal played five sets of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots until Nadal — after nearly five hours of punch and counterpunch — finally sprung Federer’s head from his shoulders, ending a streak of five consecutive titles.

Few words in journalism are more overused than epic — though iconic is one. But this was the rare epic that was epic. It was a pleasure to watch two athletes care as much as Federer and Nadal appeared to. John McEnroe once told me that every year in Paris, when he broadcasts the French Open, he will wake up at least once in his hotel room in a cold sweat, having just dreamed of his come-from-ahead loss to Ivan Lendl in the French final. The French final of 1984.

And so one can imagine Federer a quarter century from now bedeviled by a similar nightmare — of his Wimbledon run literally fading to black. As he hoisted the silver salad plate of the runner-up in the flash-bulbed gloaming at Centre Court, I went to the garage and pantomimed a few ground strokes, looking forward to the next time I can open a new can of balls — and perhaps a can of whoop-ass — on some city court somewhere.