As the Ohio State football team gets ready to host Penn State tonight, we need to revisit the Buckeyes’ 49-28 win over Maryland last Saturday.

If you watched the game on TV, then you saw then Terrapins head coach Randy Edsall any number of times on the sideline. The rumors that he would likely get fired – which turned out to be true just hours after the game, if not before that – caused Edsall to be the focus of conversation on the telecast, especially after the Buckeyes began pulling away and the human part of what was going on with him began to settle in.

And if you’re a Browns fan – particularly one for a number of years – then you spotted a familiar face nearly every time the cameras focused on Edsall. Standing next to him with a headset on was second-year Terrapins wide receivers coach Keenan McCardell.

Yes, the same Keenan McCardell who was a wide receiver with the Browns for the final four years of the original franchise’s existence in Cleveland (1992-95) and then played 12 more seasons with five other teams to complete a fine 17-year NFL career.

McCardell had 80 receptions for 1,133 yards and eight touchdowns with the Browns overall, but he had much more production elsewhere, finishing his career with 883 catches for 11,373 yards and 63 TDs.

A two-time Pro Bowler who was with a pair of Super Bowl-winning teams, McCardell, following his retirement as a player, was wide receivers coach for three seasons with the Washington Redskins (2010-12), with whom he spent his first NFL season in 1991, and then went to Maryland in 2014.

Why so much focus now on McCardell, who is now 45 and a married father of four children?

Because this is the 20th anniversary of the last season of the original Browns before they moved to Baltimore and were renamed the Ravens. For some strange reason, not much has been written or discussed recently about that historic – and sickeningly sad and disappointing – season.

From those of us who were beat writers covering the Browns back then, there are a number of memories – most of them nightmarish as one of the cornerstones of the community for then 50 years just got up and walked away – that will stay with us until the day we die.

But for me at least, perhaps the most pleasant recollection – possibly the only one – of that season involved McCardell.

First, though, we need to tell you about McCardell.

One of the nicest guys I ever ran across in covering the team for over a quarter-century now, he refused to let it get to him that Browns head coach Bill Belichick never thought much of him and as such really didn’t give him a chance to show what he could do.

Belichick looked at football – and football players – back then a whole lot differently than he does now. During his five years in Cleveland (1991-95) in his first head-coaching job at any level, he was interested only in players who had all the measurables – that is, a unique combination of size, speed and strength. He didn’t think smallish, slower players who were unable to bench-press the corner of the building had any chance to be productive in the NFL.

And oh, yes, they also had to come from a major college program.

Belichick has done a 180-degree turn on that philosophy since then. After all, he has had as some of his top receivers in New England Munchin-sized guys from Kent State. No disrespect to the Golden Flashes, but they …

With the fact that he had a very slight build at just 6-foot-1 and 191 pounds, that he wasn’t particularly strong or fast, that he had played at UNLV, which was and still is a basketball school and not a football school, and that he was just a 12th-round – last-round – pick in the 1991 NFL Draft by the Redskins, who didn’t allow him to touch the field during the 1991 season before cutting him, McCardell flunked out on all of Belichick’s prerequisites. In reality, it was amazing that Belichick kept him McCardell around for four years.

It didn’t matter that McCardell had tremendous hands – much better than those of the high-profile receivers brought in by Belichick, most of whom couldn’t catch a cold. It didn’t matter that, at least to my recollection, McCardell never dropped a pass in practices or games during his entire time in Cleveland. Really.

Now, a disclaimer here: He may have dropped a few – or maybe even more than a few — but I either didn’t see him do or don’t recall it happening.

It boggled my mind – and that of my fellow media members – that Belichick kept pushing McCardell to the back of the depth chart. When he was finally given a chance in 1995 – and we use the word “chance” loosely because he started only five games – McCardell finished second on the team and first, by a long shot, of all the wide receivers, with 56 catches for 709 yards and four touchdowns.

Don’t get me wrong. Belichick has forgotten more football in the last 10 minutes than any of those 1995 beat writers will ever know in 10 lifetimes, but at least we were right in our belief that McCardell could play – and play well – in the NFL. That was proven once he left the Browns/Ravens following that 1995 season. In fact, in 1996 with the second-year Jacksonville Jaguars, McCardell had 85 receptions for 1,129 yards and three touchdowns and made the Pro Bowl.

And he just kept going from there.

Ah, the Jaguars, and Jacksonville. That’s with whom, and where, our happy tale from the 1995 season involving McCardell, takes place.

There were not many – but still, really too many — players on those 1995 Browns who either were too naïve or ignorant about what was going on as the season wound down and the franchise got ready to head to Baltimore, or just didn’t care. At all.

That does not bode well for their intelligence level or their souls, but they shall remain nameless (are you listening somewhere out there, former tight end/long snapper Brian Kinchen, who was the most indifferent and/or ignorant one of them all?).

Remember, the NFL’s announcement that a Browns expansion team would return to the field in 1999, would not come for two months. So, as far as anyone knew then, this was it for the Cleveland Browns. Period. End of statement. End of an era. End of everything.

McCardell was not one of those knuckleheads – not at all, in fact. Along with Earnest Byner, “T-Bone” Tony Jones, Steve Everitt and Bob Dahl, who grew up in Chardon, Ohio as a Browns fan, McCardell fully understood the significance of what was going on and sympathized – really, truly so – with the plight of Browns fans and the community in losing something so dear to them.

The Browns finished the season on Christmas Eve against the Jaguars at Jacksonville. Bah, humbug!

There was some symmetry to it all, for the Browns’ first game in 1946 was against an expansion team from Florida in the Miami Seahawks, and their final contest was also against an expansion team from Florida in the Jaguars. But no one was thinking about that. There was just too much hurt to see any of those kinds of tentacles to this terrible story.

And to make matters worse, the Browns lost 24-21 on a field goal in the final seconds. The Jaguars’ first field-goal try was no good, but the Browns were offside – was the player a relative of Tramon Williams, perhaps? – and the second attempt was right down the middle.

After finishing 11-5 and making the playoffs in 1994, causing Sports Illustrated to predict in its 1995 season preview that they would make their first Super Bowl appearance, the Browns instead flipped their record and went a dismal 5-11, losing seven of their final eight games.

Yikes!

That ending fit the whole situation like a glove.

It wasn’t a nightmare. It was much more than that.

In the quiet-as-a-church-mouse Cleveland locker room afterward, the players took off that classic-looking all-white Browns uniform one last time, got showered and dressed and got ready for the plane ride back to Cleveland.

There wasn’t much the players could say about the situation or the season or the moment — at this point. It had all been said before – 100 times, perhaps.

Just as a I was getting ready to leave and go back up to the press box to write the obituary on the team I grew up rooting for, I spotted McCardell at one end of the locker room.

Very carefully and meticulously – as if he were handling an heirloom, and maybe he was – there he was folding his Browns No. 87 jersey on his knees as he sat on a folding chair in front of his locker.

As he did so, McCardell never took his eyes off that jersey, studying it up and down – every single, solitary inch of it. He was trying to memorize what that jersey looked like, what it meant to him at that moment and what it would mean to him down the road.

As I walked up to him, McCardell, never removing his gaze from that jersey, said with what was clearly a tremendous amount of pride, “I’m going to tell my kids and grandkids that I got to play for the Cleveland Browns. Yup, their dad and granddad got to play for none other than the Cleveland Browns.”

Then he just as carefully and meticulously placed it into his luggage bag in a way it would not get wrinkled.

Perhaps other players also kept their jerseys from that game. I don’t recall.

But I know McCardell kept his jersey, and was honored to do so. He knew he wouldn’t be moving on with the transplanted Browns to Baltimore, and he was right, for they made him a free agent.

At the same time, though, he made sure that the memories of his time with the Browns, and in Cleveland, would be with him wherever he went, both as a player and as a person.

Along with that, he gave a 40-year-old sportswriter something good to take with him as well when all the other stuff left to take out of that miserable season, was well .. miserable.

And with that, then, I owe Keenan McCardell a big debt of thanks. Here’s hoping that he and all the other Maryland assistant coaches, all of whom will surely get fired at the end of the season by the new head coach who comes in, will find jobs – even better ones — elsewhere.