Which one still eats at you?

OK, OK, granted, they all still eat at every one of us. They’ve gnawed at us for nearly each and every day for not just years, but now decades.

But what is the worst of the worst for you? Which one digs into your heart and soul unlike any of the others? Which one can cause you to get emotional, mad, sad, disappointed and exacerbated, all in a matter of a few seconds?

That’s the question we will silently – or perhaps not so silently – be asking ourselves tonight at 9:30 when the much-anticipated “Believeland” documentary, chronicling Cleveland’s heart-crushing events with its three sports teams, airs as part of ESPN’s always well-done “30 for 30” series.

We know all too well the storylines that will be featured tonight, much of which apparently focuses on the Browns. We’ve relived them in our heads over and over and over again. We could write them ourselves, recite them.

And we could break down those games, those moments like no one else.

But we can go beyond the numbers and statistics, the play-by-plays. Everybody knows those. What we can do – because we’re Northeast Ohioans, we’re sports fans and we’re darn proud of it – is dissect the emotion of it all, to be able to explain how each situation took a piece of us that we may well never get back.

Sure, these are just games, in their most basic form. Who wins and who loses won’t affect world peace or cure cancer. We’re not splitting the atom here. Life will go on no matter what the final score.

But if our team wins and wins big, really, really big, then life will go so much more merrily – not just for a while, but for a lifetime. We can hang our hat on that.

They say that laughter is the fuel of the soul. And as such, then, winning a championship – to be the very best there is for just one year, certainly we’d like a bunch of years in a perfect world, but we’ll take just one year nonetheless and be delighted with it – is the fuel of the sports fan. The hope of that – of feeling unbridled joy, the likes of which is so grand that you can’t really put it into words — keeps us coming back again and again, for as long as it takes.

For some fan bases – like ours – the hope  spans the generations.

And tonight’s program will be a reminder of that. It will be a reminder of what makes us, us – the perseverance, the steadfastness, the refusal to quit.

But to say it’s easy would be a lie.

It has taken years off our lives, or so it seems.

Is it really healthy to have our hearts dancing a jig one moment, and then falling clumsily into the pit of our stomachs the next?

No.

But that’s what we signed up for, unabashedly and reluctantly, both at once, if that makes any sense.

And because it has been so hard for so long, we know it will be just that much sweeter when it happens.

When, not if, mind you.

Perhaps tonight’s program will make you cry a little bit, and that’s OK. Actually, it’s more than OK. It’s expected. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t care so much about this stuff – if you didn’t put everything you’ve got into your fandom. Come on, man, fan is short for fanatic.

In Cleveland, we’re really fanatics. We’re the best fanatics in pro sports.

Who’s better?

Really, who’s as good?

Waiting.

Waiting.

Still waiting.

See, I was right. You can’t come up with anyone.

We’ve earned our stripes.

They’ve been passed down to us through the generations.

Our personal generations.

Yours and mine.

God bless them, every one.

Tonight will be like digging through a drawer and finding long-forgotten home movies of when Mom and Dad were still around and life was good. “Believeland” will pop that film into one of those old projectors and take us back to where we were, and who we were with, when all those moments were made. We’ll see their faces in our mind’s eye, remember them and smile through the tears.

They wouldn’t want us to give up now. So to pay tribute to them, we’ll watch tonight.

And tomorrow we’ll start hoping again.

Because …. well, just like the title, “We believe.”

And as for which one eats at me the most, you’ll have to come back tomorrow to find out.