Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight as Cleveland's Persons of the Year

With the annual hullabaloo over TIME's Person of the Year announcement (Pope Francis, if you somehow missed the frenzy), I posed a local variant of the question on Twitter today: Who is Cleveland's Person of the Year?

The answer, of course, is the trio young women who broke free from Ariel Castro's torturous grasp on Seymour Avenue in May.

Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight: Tens of thousands of words have been written about them (with more to come via their respective book deals), but Cleveland and the rest of the world have reveled in the joy of their rescue all year.