It has been a strange year for Cleveland sports fans (see above).  LeBron is back, and saying nice things about staying a Cav for a while.  And Johnny Manziel, AKA Johnny Football, has become a Brown.  He might be just another 1st-round quarterback bust, but he might not be . . .

I think that the first and most important ingredient for making a Cleveland sports fan is hope.  It’s very easy to give up on the Browns, Indians, and Cavs, and adopt another team.  I know a lot of Cleveland-area Yankees fans, for example.  Or, when I was in middle and high school, Bulls fans.  It’s easy to let go of the “mistake on the lake” (a phrase sometimes used to describe Municipal Stadium, and sometimes used to describe Cleveland itself).

But we don’t.  We Cleveland sports fans don’t let go.  We accept that Cleveland has struggled.  We remember Don Strock – our gray-haired quarterback fill-in – or Bert Blyleven, who led the major leagues in home runs given up.  We also remember our close calls, something so bittersweet.  We all remember Mark Price and all of those losses to the Bulls in the playoffs.  We all hated Denver and John Elway for driving heroically down the field and breaking our hearts (and hated Earnest Byner for making it possible).

So, the first ingredient, the price of admission, is hope.  We don’t let you in if you can’t accept that winning is possible.  We’re very quick to let go of that hope as the season progresses, of course.  But at the start of the season, we still believe. . .

(I can’t forget George Will testifying in Congress about baseball, and his comments about Cleveland being an aberration.  How he dismissed our great run in the ’90’s as the result of revenue from Jacobs Field, and predicted – correctly, it turns out – that the run would end as other teams caught up with new stadiums.  Sometimes I hate that guy.)

Our Browns have a winning record.  It has very little to do, directly, with Johnny Football.  Perhaps the world is noticing our record partly because of that guy.  But he hasn’t helped us win ON the field.  Right now, there’s still hope.

Our Cavs haven’t even started playing yet, and they’re favored to win the Eastern conference and go to the Finals.

While we have a lot to hope for this year, there’s so much experience behind us that makes us want to doubt.  Part of being a Cleveland sports fan means being ready to let go of that hope.  Of trying not to be heartbroken when someone important gets injured, and we lose.  Of trying not to cry when Charlie Nagy can’t quite jump high enough to catch Edgar Renteria’s hit up the middle in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series.  Or burning a jersey when LeBron left the first time . . . because that meant that yet another opportunity to win and be great had left town.

I hope that this is the year for Cleveland, that the Browns can win more than 5 games, that the Cavs can go deep into the playoffs, that the Indians will pull together enough wins and good pitching to contend, that something good will finally come for us, other than hype and hope and . . . bad jokes.

Go Cleveland.