Whether they’re rooting for the Browns, Cavaliers or Indians, or all of them, Cleveland fans are the greatest in the world.
That’s been said over the years any number of times by any number of people – including me here and elsewhere on too many occasions to count – and while people in Northeast Ohio know it to be true, there are those outside who have doubted it because it’s an opinion.
It was always an opinion rooted in facts, certainly – lots and lots and lots of facts – but still an opinion nonetheless because it took the piecing together of all the facts to lead one to that conclusion. The facts are solid – all of them – but none of them stand out singularly to prove that point.
Then Wednesday happened, producing a number that has made it so that our opinion is now shared by everyone. From our old buddy and pal Skip Bayless to everyone living in the San Francisco Bay area, they have no choice but to hop on board with us and agree that Cleveland does have the best fans around.
The number is 1.3 million people, the attendance at the victory parade for the newly-crowned NBA champion Cavaliers in Downtown Cleveland.
The number is beyond stunning.
It is beyond staggering.
It is beyond off the charts.
It is beyond earthshaking.
It is beyond startling.
It is beyond mind-blowing.
Or mind-numbing.
It is beyond even historic.
It is, in fact, beyond unbelievable.
Even In a place that’s called “Believeland,” that’s … well, hard to believe.
Granted, that’s an estimate – just an educated guess, really – so it’s possible there were less than 1.3 million people there. But at the same time, it’s also possible that there were more than 1.3 million, taking up nearly every square foot of ground, and also nearly every square foot of space off the ground, in parking decks, office buildings and ledges along the parade route and basically shutting down traffic in the central part of the city and beyond as wildly excited, incredibly delirious and thankfully joyous fans packed themselves along the parade route to, for the first time in 52½ years, get a real-life, real-time glimpse of what champions from Cleveland looked like.
More than three times the population of Cleveland – and just under one-third of the population of all of Northeast Ohio — arrived en masse as a mass of humanity to be able to say they were there.
Was it tough to get there, from here, or anywhere?
No, it wasn’t really tough. Rather it was downright impossible.
But doing the impossible is nothing out of the ordinary, really, for this special lot of people, and fans, and their doggedly determined team.
That’s a fact, too, by the way.
It was important – no, make that necessary and a must – to be there. This was a once-in-a-lifetime event. If you were a young person in 1964 when the Browns thumped the Baltimore Colts 27-0 to win the NFL championship, you are now an old – ahem, older – person. Frank Ryan, who threw three touchdown passes in that game, will turn 80 years old in 2½ weeks, and Gary Collins, who caught all of them, will turn 76 in a little less than two months.
Yes, you read their upcoming ages correctly.
We hope that it – a championship — will happen again in Cleveland sooner rather than later, and maybe even this fall with the Indians. But just as we found out after Ryan and Collins combined to put on one of the greatest title game performances in the history of the NFL, there are hardly any guarantees.
It has always been said that Cleveland, with its passionate fan base in every sport, is a sleeping giant.
Well, the giant finally awoke, and he turned out to be bigger than expected.
We had that validated Wednesday, three days after the Cavs gave the giant a reason to wake up.
Now, if the Browns could just …
More on that tomorrow.
