Is Cleveland still Brownstown?

The Cleveland Browns may have temporarily loaned Brownstown to the Cleveland Cavaliers, but if they ever win a Super Bowl it will dwarf what we witnessed last week.

It’s a good thing I drove the 345 miles and didn’t have to live up to my Dawg Pound Daily pledge to “walk back to Cleveland for the parade down Euclid Avenue.”

Google maps calculates the trek at four days and 19 hours (not including bathroom breaks), so even if I had started walking at the final buzzer of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, I wouldn’t have arrived in time to join 1.3 million of my closest friends for Wednesday’s Believeland Bachanalia.

Less than a week has passed, yet it seems there’s been more reported, replayed, Facebooked, Instagrammed and Snapchatted about the Cleveland Cavaliers’ surrealistic, out-of-Northeast Ohio body experience Game 7 NBA Finals championship victory than has been chronicled about the rise of Western Civilization. Except one theoretical still needs dissecting: what would a Cleveland Browns Super Bowl parade look like?

Maybe it’s my hangover from a pent-up 52-year long bender* but like Roy Scheider warned in Jaws: if the Browns ever win a Super Bowl, “we’re gonna’ need a bigger boat.” (*Ohio’s drinking age was 18 and I wasn’t quite 13 when it seemed I was the only sober fan at Cleveland’s last title game in 1964 – and I still have recurring nightmares about those trough urinals at old Municipal Stadium.)

Sure, ESPN televised the Cavs parade live on its global platforms, but at its core, Cleveland’s still Brownstown as I confirmed with my own eyes last week:

• Call it a weird science experiment – or maybe because the line for the Cavs team shop extended across the Lorain-Carnegie bridge – but my wife, Janet, and I intentionally wore our Brown and Orange around town and were bombarded with “Go Browns” and “Can’t wait for our Super Bowl.” That’s a sign of something. Yes, delusion, but also that the rapture of Believeland will never be fully realized until the Browns win a Lombardi Trophy.
• Bernie Kosar was the first person invited to the parade, the Cavs executive float featured Earnest Byner, and only LeBron James earned louder cheers than Jim Brown – and not by much. At the Cavs parade!
• The most irrefutable evidence that the Browns remain Cleveland’s first love? Lead sports story on clevleand.com he morning of the Cavs parade: “Cody Kessler and Corey Coleman – Now it’s our turn.”  Two Browns rookies who landed on the shores of Lake Erie from California and Texas and who still need a GPS to find the Terminal Tower. Before camp, before the first pre-season game, do they even have jersey numbers? Yet, Kessler said the 30 for 30 Believeland documentary “gave him chills.”.

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Enroute to Cleveland, Janet heard the Cavs parade would draw upwards of a half million people. I said “you must have misheard that. Woodstock only had 400,000. I predict maybe 200,000 people tops – a little more than twice a Browns game in the old place.”

I was wrong by 700 percent. If Cleveland ever hosts a Super Bowl parade for the Browns, I’m guessing 5 million fans, minimum, from all around the world. And maybe even a few from outer space, since it’ll probably occur about the same time that we inhabit Mars.

There’s only one mitigating factor that could depress the turnout for that Browns Super Bowl parade: as of today, the Cleveland Indians have the best chance to represent the American League in the 2016 World Series, so the Cleveland fanbase could get jaded – and we’d go from lovable losers to annoying whiners.

Like Boston.