Cleveland Browns close to being unseated as city’s last champion

The Cleveland Cavaliers are one game away from bringing the city its first major professional sports title since the 1964 Cleveland Browns.

The 1964 Cleveland Browns may be the most-referenced professional sports team from that decade.

Whenever the city of Cleveland and its professional sports teams come up, the 1964 Browns are always referenced as the city’s last championship winning team.

Led by Jim Brown, the Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts 27-0 in the 1964 NFL Championship Game. The win marked the Browns first championship since 1955, and fans probably thought the team had returned to a championship level for years to come. About that.

It is 2016 and the city of Cleveland had endured countless heartbreak from the Browns, Cavaliers and Indians since the last title in 1964. The infamous Cleveland, or anti-Cleveland depending on who you ask, montages depict all the devastation, so they need not be individually recapped here.

But the years of disappointment may be coming to an end Sunday night as LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers take on the Golden State Warriors in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. LeBron is to Cleveland the same way Jim Brown was and still is, so it would be a fitting player to end the title drought.

The two days before the game will be filled with talk of the 1964 Browns team and its title, but that talk will fade away if the Cavaliers pull out a victory.

An NBA title would make the 2015-16 Cavaliers the city’s most memorable team, but that takes nothing away from the 1964 Browns. 52 years is long enough to celebrate a championship, and it would be hard to find a person in Cleveland who doesn’t want to move on from a championship that was won before the Super Bowl existed.

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A title in 2016 would give generations of Cleveland sports fans a chance to celebrate a championship for the first time.

(Yes, the Lake Erie Monsters just won the Calder Cup in the American Hockey League, but this article focuses on the major professional sports teams. Still, congratulations to the Monsters and the Columbus Blue Jackets organization.)

The montages of heartbreak would still exist, but the end would feature a long-awaited title for a city in need of one.

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There is also the possibility of the Cavaliers losing Sunday, which would bring the 1964 Browns back into the spotlight. But this is a time of optimism and hope. Other emotions can be dealt with Sunday night if need be. There is always that 1964 NFL Championship to fall back on if things go south.