I bleed orange, brown, and hope
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- January 7, 2024
- 914
I wrote this piece some years ago — I’m not sure the year. Those Cleveland seasons all blend into a brown and orange haze. I thought it might be fun to pull out this hope-filled piece as we head into the last game of the season knowing we’re headed for a playoff berth. I have a love/hate relationship with the Browns, as we all do, but I couldn’t be more excited than I am right now. Is it the year? I never give up hope.
Most people write about football when the season is fresh and the possibilities are endless. Today, I’m writing to you from the end of the season, where dreams lie in a crumpled mess in the corner, like a pile of towels that need a good washing. You know the corner I’m talking about. It’s the one we’ve grown up knowing we would enter when the end of December came around, where our maybe’s and what if’s and next years are tucked gently under our vintage sweatshirts of orange and brown. It’s where the Red Right 88s and the drives haunt our dreams and where we wake up covered in sweat only to realize it’s January, we have months to rest and revive ourselves to wellness once again.
It’s Northeast Ohio. And it’s that blasted love for the Cleveland Browns.
If you could see me, I’m smiling and sipping lightly on my coffee as I gently pack away my Browns sweatshirt for the winter. I grew up in a high school without football. I can’t say that I missed it.
I also grew up in a household where from September through December, that fuzzy Zenith console TV was tuned into the Browns game. Some Sundays it was on the Steubenville channel and we hauled out the antennae controller, listening while the behemoth lurched and kicked near the roofline. We would watch the squiggly snow on the screen slowly dissipate as the field came into view, and we would yell for it to stop moving because it had reached the perfect location. Church moved oh so slowly as the hands of the clock ticked minute by minute until we could head home and ready for the game. Soup or a casserole would be ready, and the couch became a soft haven for three hours of gridiron action.
I’m not sure Dad set out for me to become a Browns fan because he knew the heartache that it was. But for that time every Sunday, I learned about first downs, offsides and holding. If I asked a question, he would answer, never taking his eyes off the screen, and Browns football — from a very young age — became a part of who I was.
Dad used to sell The Cleveland Plain Dealer off the back of his truck in our garage because we couldn’t get it anywhere else around here. I think it was so he could read the PD sports section. Without being spoken, I learned the Pittsburgh Steelers were never to be rooted for, unless they were in the Super Bowl, and then it was a nice thing to want our conference to win. I didn’t believe him, though, because I knew the black and yellow were the enemy of all things orange and brown. I’ll be buried in my Browns sweatshirt before I ever root for the Steelers. That would be taking 40 years of collected Cleveland-all-the-things and flushing it down the toilet.
I left Sundays occasionally. When I married, I soon learned my husband didn’t have a love for football, and when he did want to watch, he liked the Dallas Cowboys. We squabbled over the channels for years, and grudgingly, he learned about Northeast Ohio’s undying love for the Browns. To this day he will make fun of them all the way through the game, but it’s only to get me riled.
One Sunday, after a particularly bad game, he took me out for pizza. In tears I explained to him — for the 100th time — why I love the Cleveland Browns. For the first time, I could see he got it, why we keep going back for punishment year after year, why we get excited when a drive goes right or we squeak out a win. We have hope, always with the hope. I don’t want to root for a championship team if it isn’t Cleveland.
Our season is now over, and Sundays will be a free-for-all of movies and random channel-surfing. It also frees up time to venture out to the theater or an afternoon of shopping. For half a year, my mind will clear of the angst of being a Northeast Ohio football fan, and I will blend into the crowd like everyone else.
Come late August, though, that itch will start. My fingers will twitch, and my hubby will roll his eyes as I change the channel and the music fills the room. He’ll rev up his Cleveland one-liners, and I’ll ready myself for another season of heartbreak — unless this year is the one … the one we’ve all been waiting for. You never know.
Melissa Herrera is a published author and opinion columnist. She is a curator of vintage mugs and all things spooky, and her book, “TOÑO LIVES,” can be found at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives. For inquiries, to purchase her book or anything else on your mind, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com or find her in the thrift aisles.