Clevelanders Wax Nostalgic at Cavs Championship 10th Anniversary Block Party

At a block party last Friday hosted by the Cavs to commemorate the 2016 NBA championship and christen the new Meet Me Here Plaza, Cavs fans relived the crowning moment ten years ago when LeBron James and company broke Cleveland’s 52-year championship drought.

“Oh, I remember it exactly,” Bless Warner, 34, told Scene. “I was at the West End in Lakewood. Kyrie Irving got the ball, it went in, and it was pure mayhem. Everybody was screaming, jumping. Bottles came out of nowhere. Champagne was popping. The whole city was on fire. We were all on the same page.”

“I will forever remember it like that,” she said. “For the rest of the night, everybody was just in pure bliss.”

In Cleveland, the summer of 2016 has been cemented in the city’s collective memory as a promise of what its downtown—and city spirit in general—could be.

“Really, I think in 2026, we’re recapturing some of that momentum that existed coming out of 2016,” Michael Deemer, the head of Downtown Cleveland, Inc., told Scene.

He nodded to the May grand opening of Sherwin Williams’ headquarters. To the Memorial Bridges Loop breaking ground. To Cosm going vertical in the distance. “I feel like this is the first year where we’re really recapturing that sense of optimism,” he said.

But for many Clevelanders who showed up Friday, to rewatch Game 7 or get merch signed by past players, June 19, 2016, was simply a capsule of good feeling. A time when Cleveland righted its self-esteem woes and earned its place in what became a global spotlight.

Mark Salisbury, 36, was an infantryman in the Marines at the time, stationed on the USS Kearsarge outside San Diego. He watched LeBron collapse in emotion on a “fuzzy TV” on a bunk.

“It was, like, insane,” Salisbury said, watching kids shoot hoops. “I was jumping up, cheering with my boy, Van Fleet. And he jumped on me like a little backpack, you know. And we’re running around the berth. It was indescribable.”

Jan and Pat Cassidy, a married couple in their early sixties, recalled the feeling of high stakes at the then-named Quicken Loans Arena. Both had been season ticket holders the majority of their lives and had grown up driving hours on end to see games.

But no memory over the decades compared to the collective want from Cavs fans around them.

“I mean, near the end of the first quarter” of Game 6, he said, “you couldn’t hear yourself talk. I was trying to talk to the guy next to me. We couldn’t hear each other.”

“And then LeBron did it,” he said. “Like, it was just very surreal.”

Could he do it again? James has teased the media about potentially bookending his 23-year-long basketball career in Cleveland.

When asked, Clevelanders interviewed on Friday jumped to thoughts of 2010’s flight to Miami, to jerseys being burned or thrown out in sidewalk trash. But most felt James coming home to end his career would be a storybook ending.

“It’s that fairy tale ending,” Darren Minor, 36, said, as Game 7 played on a screen in front of him. “It don’t get no better. You finish where you start and you go out.”