This week — Super Bowl week — is a heckuva lot of fun for two teams each year, and not any fun at all for the NFL’s 30 other clubs.

The ones playing in the game this time, on Sunday night, the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, are having a blast making memories that will last a lifetime as they get ready to play a game on the sport’s — and the sports world’s — largest stage. Indeed, there are cups and tournaments and madness and finals and series, but the Super Bowl is a single event and so when it’s played, that’s the biggest sports night of the year. And the days leading up to it are like the shopping days heading into Christmas.

There’s nothing like being in the game, and in a real sense, there’s nothing like not being in it, for the pain of being on a spectator team and watching someone else have all the fun serves as a reminder to work harder and better so you can be among those enjoying the laughs and thrills next year at this time.

Or at least it should be.

For a five-year span nearly 40 years ago, when the Browns were going to the AFC Championship Game on a regular basis, they had a tremendous thirst and desire to crash through to the next level and make it to that even bigger game for the first time. I wish I could say the same thing for the current Browns. I can’t say they do, or that they don’t. I just don’t know.

This is a good time to make that determination, and if the fire and want-to aren’t there, then you had better find a way to generate it because that — getting to the Super Bowl — is why you play the game.

Steve King

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