Tuesday is the 73rd anniversary of D-Day, which is the perfect time to talk about Pro Football Hall of Fame wide receiver Dante Lavelli.

 

Lavelli, the Hudson (Ohio) High School product and a member of Ohio State’s first national championship team in 1942, served in the Army’s 28th Infantry Division in World War II and was part of the invasion of Normandy, France on June 6, 1944. Along with all the other Allied servicemen, he fought courageously at Normandy, just as he did in two other significant offensives of the war, the Battle of the Bulge and the Siege of Bastogne.

 

He carried that bravery and toughness into pro football while playing on the first 11 Browns teams from 1946-56. With Lavelli helping to lead the way, the Browns played in the league championship game in each of the first 10 of those seasons, four in the All-America Football Conference from 1946-49, where they won four titles, and then six in the NFL from 1950-55, where they captured three crowns.

 

So they were 7-3 overall on the biggest stage.

 

Not bad, not bad at all.

 

A recent list of the 15 pro sports teams that have played for a league championship in at least four consecutive seasons includes the Browns in third place. However, they were given credit for only the six NFL seasons. Their four title trips in the AAFC were ignored.

 

That happens a lot with the AAFC-era Browns and all their eye-popping accomplishments. It’s as if the league never existed, and as such what the Browns did means nothing.

 

No one on those early Browns teams was prouder of that success than Lavelli. He’d tell anyone who would listen – and even those who wouldn’t – just how special those AAFC clubs were. Using that World War II determination, he refused to let anyone belittle those feats.

 

The signature moment in that effort came, appropriately so, in connection with the AAFC-era Browns’ signature season of 1948, in which they finished 15-0, putting an exclamation point – or two or three or four – behind it with a 49-7 blowout of the Buffalo Bills in the championship game. It was the most points they scored all season, and the fifth time that year that they had held their opponents to just seven points.

 

In 2007, as New England finished the regular season at 16-0 and then swept through the AFC playoffs to push its record to 18-0 heading into Super Bowl XLII against the New York Giants, much was made of the Patriots’ attempt to become the first NFL team since the 1972 Miami Dolphins (17-0) to finish the season with a perfect record and a league championship.

 

For a long time, nothing – absolutely nothing – was said of the 1948 Browns having also accomplished that feat of perfection.  It was because, as mentioned, what happened in the AAFC didn’t really count.

 

But then one of the networks – I believe it was CBS – tracked down Lavelli, then just short of his 85th birthday, and interviewed him live from his condo in his longtime home of Rocky River, Ohio.

 

Lavelli was experiencing some dementia, but at times when a subject really piqued his interest and dug its way into his heart and soul, a light would go on and he would be as sharp as a tack as long as the conversation stayed right there. This was such a time.

 

With his mind working like a well-oiled machine, enabling him to turn back the clock six decades in HD clarity, he took full advantage of the opportunity to talk up what he and his teammates did that season, including playing three games in eight days in one week, all on the road – on opposite coasts, no less — against some of the AAFC’s best clubs. The longer he talked, the more fire there was in his eyes and the more fervor in his voice. By the end, he seemed ready to don a pair of cleats and a set shoulder pads and use his “Glue Fingers” — that was his nickname – to snare a few passes and prove his point.

 

Lavelli died about a year later, and with it went the strongest voice in the room.

 

No one is left from the group of Browns who played on all four AAFC teams, and only several remain from the 1948 team, the most notable of them being wingback Dub Jones, a Cleveland Browns Legend who was in the first of his eight seasons with the team, and running back Ara Parseghian, the product of Akron South High School and Miami of Ohio who was in the first of his two seasons with the club before going on to an iconic college coaching career at his alma mater, Northwestern and Notre Dame.

 

Parseghian is 94. Jones is 92.

 

With that, then, the time for the story of the AAFC-era Browns to be told from a first-person perspective is, sadly so, running short.