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| Oh, how happy, you have made me.. |
Stephen King once wrote about the
rarity of truly good days. That is, days completely free of stress, anger or
unpleasant thoughts; where it's green lights all the way from the time you're
eating your Wheaties until you situate yourself under the covers and click off
the light. King posits there is less than a month of those genuinely good days
throughout the course of any natural person's life. The horror master's theory
begs the question:
How many days like this
has there been in all of our years of Cleveland
fandom? Four hours of an otherwise ordinary late-September
Sunday were a happy confluence of events where everything came together for us like a
once-a-century alignment of the planets.
The Browns, so bedraggled and
dysfunctional after two depressing losses and the ice-water-to-the-face trade
of last year's No. 1 pick, suddenly
seem like the toast of the AFC North. Just about 30 minutes after the
Browns' exhilarating win over a division rival (and just writing
"Browns" and "exhilarating" in the same sentence is a
pleasant change from the norm), Jason Kipnis was snagging a seeing-eye ground ball to send the Indians into whatever farkakta Wild Card playoff system MLB
has set up.
Today just felt good, and perhaps
all the sweeter for its infrequency. Fanbases supporting historically winning
franchises simply cannot understand what days like this mean to Cleveland die-hards. A
football team scratching it's way to .500 and a baseball team having to win a
one-game playoff just to make it into the division series would likely be
humdrum for fans in New York , Los
Angeles or Boston .
In Cleveland ,
where the post-LeBron era has produced a total of zero playoff appearances from all three major franchises - well, it's
like a dying man getting that first sip of water after years baking under a
merciless desert sun.
It's a beautiful thing, really, and
all the more lovely for the way it's connected the city to something good and
positive. We're so used to negatives piling on top of negatives, and abysmally
tired of defending ourselves from tousle-haired Douche Baggins' types who work for
cologne-scented men's magazines and write lazy,
cheap hit pieces about the sorry state of Cleveland sports.
The sun shined down on our city
today, Cleveland
fans, and there's nothing wrong with lifting our faces to bask in those warming
rays. It's something we could get used to.