Today is Halloween, when there is a preponderance of crazy things – stuff that’s just bizarre, doesn’t seem to make sense and causes you to scratch your head and wonder if it’s real or just imagined.
 
It can also be downright frightening in some regards, especially if something happens that you’re not expecting, which is what Halloween is all about.
 
Combine all that with the fact that this was yet another week of jaw-dropping, out-of-this-world occurrences with the Browns, and what you have is a situation where, indeed, all the stars seemed to have aligned themselves under some spooky full moon.
 
Feel that tingling down your spine?   
 
As such, then, it’s the perfect time for the Browns to be playing the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday at FirstEnergy Stadium, a week after facing the St. Louis Rams on the road.
 
And, for frustrated Browns fans, it’s a good opportunity to scream, laugh, or cry, or perhaps even a little of all three.
 
Back in 1985, when the movie Back to the Future came out, no one – absolutely, positively no one, not even the spirits, and not even Doc Brown or Marty McFly – could have imagined what has gone on in the NFL in the 30 years since then, and where we find ourselves today. It’s the stuff of which science fiction is made.
 
Call it the NFL version of Ripley’s Believe it or Not.
 
Now, pay close attention, please, because this stuff gets confusing and even complicated.
 
And no, before you ask, we’re not making any of this stuff up.
 
For starters, these current Browns, as we know all too well, are not the same franchise that began in Cleveland in 1946 and played here for 50 years. That bunch went to Baltimore following the 1995 season and is now known as the Ravens, with … yuck, two Super Bowl championships.
 
As for the Cardinals, they started play in Chicago in 1920, went to St. Louis in 1960 and were tagged the St. Louis Football Cardinals so as to not be confused with the immensely more popular and successful St. Louis Baseball Cardinals, and then moved to Phoenix in 1988. From then through 1993, they were known as the Phoenix Cardinals, then they changed their name to the Arizona Cardinals to represent the whole state, like the Minnesota Twins.
 
The Rams started in Cleveland in 1937 and played there through 1945, when they won the NFL championship. But before they had the chance to celebrate, they up and went to Los Angeles in 1946 and remained there – or thereabouts, finally settling in nearby Anaheim – through 1994, after which they trekked back east to St. Louis, where they filled that city’s seven-year absence of pro football.
 
Now the Rams want desperately to move back to Los Angeles, filling a void that city has had since 1995, when the Raiders went back to Oakland and the Rams left L.A. for St. Louis.
 
Geez, can’t these teams make up their minds? Pick a town and stay there, for crying out loud.
 
The Raiders started in 1960 as a charter member of the AFL and stayed in Oakland through 1981, when, only a year after they won the Super Bowl in the Red Right 88 season of 1980 when the Browns were supposed to win it, they went to Los Angeles.
 
They stayed there through 1994, being in the same community with the Rams and in fact playing their home games in Memorial Coliseum, where the Rams called home before going to Orange County. The Raiders then returned to Oakland. Now, only 20 years later, they, like the Rams, desperately want to go back to Los Angeles.
 
We could mention that the Chargers, who have been in San Diego since 1961, actually played their first season of 1960 in Los Angeles as a charter member of the AFL. They were in the same city as the Rams for that season, giving L.A. a taste of what it felt like to be a two-football team town again for the first time since 1946-49, when a team called the Los Angeles Dons played with the Browns in the All-America Football Conference.
 
Yeah, we could mention that, but it would just confuse you even more, which we probably just did. So forget all that. Here’s the CliffsNotes version of the pro football history of Los Angeles: It’s nutty.
 
And it would really confuse you if we said that the Chargers also desperately want to return to Los Angeles.
 
So three teams that were once in Los Angeles really want to go back there. At most, probably only two will get their wish. Still, we hope that Los Angeles is big enough. After all, that’s two more teams than the city has now.
 
By the way, how close is Los Angeles to where Hill Valley, the fictional town in Back to the Future, was supposed to be located? Just wondering.
 
More about the Chargers: They made it to the AFL Championship Game in that lone season in Los Angeles in 1960 and lost to the Houston Oilers, who are now based in Nashville and known as the Tennessee Titans.
 
The Titans are the second pro football team to have that moniker. The New York Titans operated as charter members of the AFL from 1960-62 and then changed their name to the Jets. The Jets, by the way, are not interested in moving to Los Angeles. As such, perhaps they are in the minority.
 
As for the Oilers, they moved to Nashville from Houston in 1997. In 2002, Houston got a new team – an expansion club — in the Texans. They are not interested in moving to Los Angeles, either.
 
The Houston Texans are the third pro football team to have that nickname. The Dallas Texans played in the NFL in 1952 and then, in a roundabout sort of way, morphed into being the second version of the Baltimore Colts.
 
A new Dallas Texans team was a charter member of the AFL in 1960 and won the league title in 1962 by topping the two-time defending league champion Houston Oilers in overtime. After the season, the Texans moved to Kansas City and became the Chiefs. The Chiefs are not interested in moving to Los Angeles.
 
Now about the Colts: They stayed in Baltimore through the 1983 season and then moved to Indianapolis, where they remain to this day. The Colts are not interested in moving to Los Angeles.
 
Baltimore was without football until 1996, when, as mentioned, the Browns left Cleveland and became the Ravens. The Ravens are not interested in moving to Los Angeles, but Browns fans would like to see them get sent there by wagon train.
 
That’s another story for another time, however.
 
Back to the Browns, who are also not interested in moving to Los Angeles. These original Browns played for years like the Cardinals are playing now, and played in 2008 when they made it to their first Super Bowl – that is, as winners.
 
Before that, the Cardinals played for decades – many decades, in fact – like these new Browns have played since returning to the NFL in 1999 – that is, as losers. From Chicago to St. Louis to Phoenix to Arizona, the Cardinals never won anything – not even close – until getting to that Super Bowl. Since then, everything has changed.
 
The Browns, by the way, were expected to be a real contender for the Super Bowl out of the AFC in 2008, but their season went south immediately and it ended in nightmarish fashion, with a 4-12 record and head coach Romeo Crennel, who is now in Houston as the defensive coordinator of the Oilers – er, Texans – getting fired.
 
Nightmarish. Hmmmm. That term seems appropriate for today.
 
So the Cardinals and Browns have exchanged roles. In their previous two visits to Cleveland, the Cardinals got flattened, losing 32-0 in 1994 to the old Browns and then 44-6 to the new Browns in 2003, when Cleveland was coming off its only playoff appearance of the expansion era and was brimming with confidence, especially offensively.
 
Now it is the Cardinals who, coming off their first playoff appearance in five years, are brimming with confidence, especially offensively, and may just rout the Browns on Sunday. In fact, the Cardinals might even go to the Super Bowl for the second time in seven years. Right now, they appear to be the best team in the NFC.
 
Saying the Cardinals are the best team in any league sounds strange after all those years of losing. But that is the new reality, so we need to embrace it.
 
Back in that Back to the Future year of 1985, which, like Doc and Marty, we used as a starting point for all this craziness we’ve discussed, the Browns were building a team that, in short order, became so good that they expected to get to at least one Super Bowl and perhaps even two. The fact it did not happen even after three trips to the AFC Championship Game in four years, in turn, started the frantic, panicked frustration of Browns owner Biff, er, Art Modell, which, again in a roundabout sort of way, eventually led to him moving the franchise to Baltimore.
 
So now we’re back to the beginning, back to a time when the old Browns are really the Ravens; Baltimore hates a Colts team it used to love; St. Louis might be left high and dry again without a team named Rams, Cardinals or anything else; Los Angeles, from which teams have steadily fled through the years, now appears to be some kind of panacea; Houston despises its old team, the Oilers, for whom they used to wave those white “Luv ya Blue” towels, making the Astrodome one of the toughest places in the NFL to play; the NFL is playing games, seemingly on a weekly basis, in London, which has never had an NFL team, but might someday will, if Commissioner Roger Goodell has his way; Bill Belichick is doing for the Patriots what Biff, er Art, thought he would for the Browns when he hired him in 1991; Bernie Kosar is estranged from the Browns, a team he has loved since he was a kid growing up in Boardman and would do just about anything to work for; the Cardinals have a head coach in Bruce Arians who desperately wanted at one time to be the head coach of the Browns, if only they would have asked him; Butch Davis wants to go back to coaching the Miami Hurricanes; Bruce Jenner is a now a woman; and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton might well end up squaring off for president.
 
Who would have thought it possible all those years ago? It’s almost as if we’re in some kind of parallel universe. Maybe we did skew off course in 1985.

And now it’s Halloween, a day when all things weird, and not as they should be, or at least as they used to be, are celebrated.
 
So fill up your flux capacitor and go out and have a good time tonight.
 
But don’t go as far as Los Angeles. There are already too many people trying to get there.