Like many of a certain age, I can remember – perfectly and with joy – the first time I saw “Star Wars.”

I was 8 years old when the movie came out in 1977, and I lined up on the sticky black asphalt parking lot of the Hillcrest Theater in Lawrence, Kan.

I had the iron-on decal T-shirt, the toy blaster gun and a crush on Carrie Fisher from which I still haven’t recovered.

So it was hard for me to keep my journalistic objectivity when I was invited to last week’s press junket at that fan-boy Mecca, George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch.

I tried to hide this highly unprofessional excitement from my colleagues when I arrived at the press hotel in nearby San Rafael, Calif., especially since most of them weren’t hiding their scorn for “Star Wars.” I heard the word “juvenile” several times, and one woman told me that, as a rule, she didn’t like any Harrison Ford movies – which was the end of that conversation.

But on the bus ride from the hotel to the ranch, I was lucky enough to sit next to a reporter from Mexico who was perhaps an even bigger nerd than I was. He was eagerly paging through the “Revenge of the Sith” graphic novel and told me that when his friends found out where he was going, “some of them went to the Dark Side on me.” His utter lack of shame inspired me to embrace my inner geek, and I’m so glad I did – because that’s the only way to truly appreciate Skywalker Ranch.

GEEK HEAVEN

Even the most jaded junketeers had to admit the scenery was beautiful.

The 2,500-acre ranch, which Lucas bought in 1978, sits far back from the highway in the rolling, green Marin County hills, about a half-hour north of San Francisco and, coincidentally, on the winding Lucas Valley Road, which was named not for George but an 1880s settler in the area.

Spring had definitely arrived on the ranch, where fences and trellises were dripping with fragrant lilacs, and yellow and pink roses – a scene worthy of Princess Leia’s gorgeous home planet of Alderaan.

We rode under overhanging trees, past the baseball diamond (where six Lucas film teams play softball) and the Skywalker Ranch’s private fire department, with its fully functional hook-and-ladder trucks.

After passing Lake Ewok and noting the X-wing fighter parked on the beach, we pulled up in front of a 50,000-square-foot Victorian-style house with a wraparound porch with perfectly placed wicker chairs.

The Main House, which was built in 1985, contains offices for Lucas and his producer, Rick McCallum, but looks like a wealthy family’s home from 1910. Lucas, who has said he might have become an architect if he had been better at math, even wrote a short story about the fictional family he imagined living in the house.

The decoration inside is worthy of an “Architectural Digest” layout; that magazine did a feature on Skywalker Ranch last year, gushing over the Tiffany chandeliers and original paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish. The place was mind-blowing, especially Lucas’s two-story research library, which is paneled in first-growth redwood and stocked with 27,000 books. A huge spiral staircase cut from a single piece of redwood rises from the first level to the balcony, and, in a nice Hollywood touch, there’s a secret door leading from the balcony to Lucas’ private office.

But for me, nothing in the house compared with what I found in a modest hallway off the front foyer, which Lucas has casually stocked with movie memorabilia, including the lightsabers Alec Guinness and Mark Hamill used in the original “Star Wars” and the Staff of Ra headpiece from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

We didn’t get to see it, but upstairs in his office, Lucas has the chess set that was photographed for Chewbacca and R2D2’s game in the original “Star Wars.”

TOUCHING THE SKY

There wasn’t time to see all 14 buildings on the spread, though I would have liked to visit the Inn, a 26-room bed-and-breakfast where James Cameron stayed when he came to the ranch to mix the sound for “Titanic.”

And much of the Lucas film business doesn’t happen at Skywalker Ranch. Many of the company’s 1,700 employees work on nearby Big Rock Ranch or in downtown San Rafael. And this summer, most are moving to a new facility that Lucas has built in San Francisco’s famed Presidio district, with views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

But Skywalker Sound is on the ranch and we did spend a lot of time in its Tech Building, which is adjacent to the Main House and built to look like a 19th-century winery.

The charming brick structure is surrounded by vines that actually produce wine grapes, and each harvest, Lucas has the fruit taken to the nearby winery owned by his pal Francis Ford Coppola, where they bottle the wine under the label Viandante del Cielo, or “Traveler of the Sky.” (That’s Skywalker to you and me.)

Inside the Skywalker Sound building is the art deco theater where we saw an advance screening of “Revenge of the Sith” last Tuesday. The screen is flanked by two life-size art nouveau bronze statues of spooky monks that actually appear in “Sith,” during a scene in Chancellor Palpatine’s office.

Lucas finished tweaking the movie so recently that Tuesday’s screening was the first time several of the principals – including animation director Rob Coleman and producer McCallum – had seen it all the way through.

McCallum introduced the movie, and after he told us how excited he was, the lights went down and the screen filled with those familiar words, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …”

Then George hit us with the music, and any last pretense of journalistic cool evaporated. I was seeing stars.