The death on Sunday of George Voinovich just one month shy of his 80th birthday brings to mind the departure of the original Browns following the 1995 season, and the titanic fight to get a new Browns team back.

Voinovich was in the midst of his two terms as governor of Ohio when owner Art Modell announced in the middle of the 1995 season that he was moving the Browns to Baltimore following that year. He was completely taken aback. He had no idea it was coming.

Ditto for Cleveland Mayor Michael White and NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. They were all floored.

But Voinovich, White and Tagliabue all should have been aware that it was coming. That they weren’t – that they were in the dark, just like everybody else — says a lot about the move and the circumstances surrounding it.

It could have ruined all of their careers. They were the guys who were on watch when the Browns, one of the pillars of the NFL, packed up and headed out of town. Their legacies were already sullied for letting it happen, and now they had to somehow figure out a way to make it right to keep their names from being completely trashed.

The pressure was on Voinovich the most. He was born and raised in Cleveland and had been the mayor of the city throughout the 1980s when the problems with Modell and the condition of Cleveland Stadium and what to do about it, first began to surface.

Since they were all in it together, Voinovich, White and Tagliabue put their heads together, and flexed their political muscles together, to try to broker some kind of deal to save pro football for Cleveland.

And when they were eventually successful with an agreement that let Modell go to Baltimore and at the same time gave Cleveland an expansion Browns team to play in a new stadium beginning in the 1999 season, they all breathed a huge sigh of relief.

They had just dodged a bullet.

If that deal had not happened, then all three men, but especially Voinovich, would have paid for it with scorn forever from angry Browns fans.

Just over two decades later, Voinovich died as an honorable man and with his reputation pretty much intact. So it all worked out well.

The same can be said for Tagliabue, who is now 75 and back practicing law in Washington, D.C., and the 64-year-old White, who is running an alpaca farm and a winery near Newcomerstown, Ohio in Tuscarawas County, south of Canton.