Somewhere those Browns icons — a number of them, actually — are smiling about the fact the team’s quarterbacks room has one and only one color, and it is Black.

All four players are African American. It is the first time in the history of the Browns, a team that has led the way in the integration of pro football and even pro sports, that it has happened.

The room includes starter Deshaun Watson, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, who was a rookie last year, and recent free-agent signees Jameis Winston and Tyler Huntley.

Incredible. Absolutely incredible. In a historic way. And in a great way.

The road for that to take place was paved first and foremost 78 years ago by Paul Brown, Bill Willis and Marion Motley.

Brown, the founding head coach of the Browns, was a visionary and trendsetter who refused to give in to the egregious common thinking of the day and signed to his first team middle guard Bill Willis, who had starred for him at Ohio State on the school’s first national championship team in 1942, and fullback Marion Motley, who had impressed him as a player at arch-rival Canton McKinley High School when he was coaching the Massilllon Tigers in the 1930s. When Motley and Willis played together in the Browns’ inaugural regular-season game on Sept. 6, 1946, they broke the color barrier for good coming out of World War II in not just pro football but also in pro sports overall. Jackie Robinson would not come along on baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers for eight more months.

A year later, in 1947, Willis and Motley were joined by punter Horace Gillom, who had played for Brown at Massillon.

And three years after that, in 1950, as the Browns entered the NFL after the demise of the All-America Football Conference, there was the arrival of defensive end Len Ford. Even by that time, most teams — in both pro football and pro baseball — were still all white.

Then in 1969, Ernie Green became one of the NFL’s first assistant coaches of color when Browns head coach Blanton Collier hired him to be in charge of the running backs, the position he had played for the team for the previous seven years before retiring.

It was in 1977 that Al Tabor, another Black, was brought to Cleveland to becone one of the NFL’s first special teams coordinators.

In 2005, Romeo Crennel became the first person of color to serve as head coach of the Browns. There are still a number of NFL clubs who have yet to reach that threshold.

But when it comes to quarterback, the position in the spotlight now with the team when it comes to color, the Browns had their first Black passer in 1976, long before most teams broke that barrier, with Dr. David Mays, a Shaker Heights dentist who came on in relief of injured starter Brian Sipe on Oct. 10 that season and engineered an 18-16 home victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the famous game when Cleveland defensive end Joe “Turkey” Jones spiked quarterback Terry Bradshaw.

So, then, as evidenced once again, this time punctuated with several exclamation points by the present makeup of the Browns quarterbacks room, all those efforts were not in vain.

And that is certainly something to smile about.

Steve King