So, it's nothing big or real, but the fantastic Joe Posnanski is on the verge of winning the Seamheads Historical Baseball World Series. He's currently whooping Bill James' historical Boston Red Sox team.
Do you care? Probably not. I bring it up though because Pos is a Cleveland boy and no one — not even those old souls still pounding out column inches on the depressing feats of Cleveland sports past for the city's own publications — really captures the time, the fans, the impending sense of doom, as Posnanski does.
As I have written before, all you need to know about my sports fan childhood is that we called it a “miracle” when the Cavaliers won the NBA Championship in 1976 …Oh, wait, the Cavaliers didn’t win that championship.
So, no, to correct … we called it a “miracle” when the Cavaliers reached the NBA Finals …
Oh, no actually, they didn’t reach the NBA Finals either.
So, yeah, we called it “The Miracle At Richfield,” when the Cleveland Cavaliers reached the EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS.
Notable miracles:
— Parting of the Red Sea.
— Feeding 5,000 (not counting women and children) with five loaves of bread and two fish.
— A spider spinning “Some Pig” in her spiderweb.
— The 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey team beating the Soviets.
— Claudette Rogers.
— The continued career of Carrot Top.What, next to those, is a Cleveland Cavaliers team almost reaching the NBA Finals (and, to be blunt, not really getting all that close)? But that’s how desperate we were for something, anything, to call our own success.
The rest of the blog post gets into his fantasy battle, which I suppose we all should be rooting for until the Cavs take care of business this spring and summer. And it's worth remembering this town's inhuman excitement at the smallest successes (the Miracle, etc.) and thinking just what might happen to this city if the Cavs do win. The burning Cuyahoga would have nothing on that.
