Flipping around the dial tonight, I happened to catch a showing of the January 17, 1988 AFC Championship Game between the Cleveland Browns and the hated Denver Broncos. The game that ended in The Fumble. This put me in mind of the previous year’s AFC Championship Game, also between these two teams, which ended in The Drive. That game, played on January 11, 1987, is now twenty years behind us. Twenty. Years.

Several things came to mind when I realized this. The first, naturally, was “Holy shit. TWENTY YEARS?” I can remember the pain caused by that drive, and I remember the visceral hate felt by every Browns fan for John Elway. He was the cockiest sonofabitch playing football at the time, so he was easy to hate. Sure, these days the league is packed with cocky self-styled thugs. It seems that’s what the aughties are all about. But that shit wouldn’t have flown in the eighties.

The second - and believe it or not, more depressing - thought was “I can’t believe it’s been that long since we had a decent football team in this town.” The Browns of that era were exciting to watch and one could feel proud to be a Browns fan. Sure, they lost in their playoff bids in ‘87, ‘88, and ‘90 against the Broncos, in ‘89 against the Oilers, and in ‘95 they lost to the Steelers in their last playoff appearance before that scumbag, Modell, took them to Baltimore.

The team we’ve had since the new Browns (the football equivalent of New Coke - a pale imitation that’s been a bad idea from the start) have pretty much sucked. Sure, they made the playoffs once - to get beaten by the Steelers again, naturally - but their record has been pretty much abysmal since ‘99.

Oh, and I’d just like to say to all those people who begged and pleaded and screamed until they were assured our ‘new’ NFL team would still be the Browns…thanks alot. We finally had a chance to come up with a name that didn’t sound stupid, and you screwed it up.

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