I can’t look at Wednesday’s date, Dec. 27, and not think of the 1964 NFL Championship Game.

And in a season like this, where the Browns’ knucklehead decision-makers in the expansion era dating all the way back to 1999 have made this once-proud franchise – and still-proud franchise, to a lot of us – the laughingstock not just of the football world, but the world overall, I am going to spend a lot of time on Wednesday thinking about the epic contest 53 years ago.

It is therapy.

It is medicine.

It is comfort.

It just feels good.

Really, really good.

It was two days after Christmas on a cold, blustery afternoon at Cleveland Stadium – not that much different than the weather throughout Northeast Ohio as you read this – that the Browns, who were 13-point underdogs, defied the odds and put together the greatest overall team effort in their history to overwhelm the great Baltimore Colts 27-0.

I say “great” when I refer to Colts because that’s exactly what they were, and who they were.

Stacked with future Pro Football Hall of Famers like John Unitas, Lenny Moore, Raymond Berry, ex-Ohio State star and Toledo Scott High School product Jim Parker, John Mackey and Gino Marchetti – for goodness sake, even their head coach, Grand River native, John Carroll product and one-time Browns defensive back Don Shula, is a Hall of Famer – the Colts were nearly the perfect team. The Browns had a lot of great players, but not as many as the Colts.

So it came as no surprise that the Browns were picked to lose, even though they were playing at home, where they almost never lost, especially in all those super seasons.

But, as the Browns’ Blanton Collier, a tremendous head coach in his own right and a Cleveland assistant coach when Shula played for the team in 1951 and ’52, kept telling his players all week leading up to the title game, “It’s amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit.’

And they bought in. To a man, they bought in.

Each player was given a specific job to do, and they all did their jobs flawlessly — so much so, in fact, that the 27-point margin of victory does not do justice to just how much the Browns dominated the game, and the Colts.

The Browns are 180 degrees from that now. That’s as far as you can be from something, anything.

The hope here for anyone who cares about this team – and there are lots and lots and lots of people in that camp – is that the Browns get back to that point as soon as possible, providing another 1964-like experience.