The Super Bowl is just a week away, and at last check, the Browns aren’t in it.

Again.

Instead, Super Bowl 58, set for Las Vegas, will pit the San Francisco 49ers, who have been in, and won, a bunch of Super Bowls, against the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs, who will be making their fourth appearance in the big game in the last six seasons.

The Chiefs represented the American Football League in the first Super Bowl 58 years ago, on Jan. 15, 1967, when they were routed 35-10 by the Green Bay Packers. They returned three years later, following the 1969 season, and, with Alliance High School product Len Dawson leading the way, they matriculated their way up and down the field well enough to get a rout of their own, 23-7 over the Minnesota Vikings, giving the AFL two straight Super Bowl wins to even up the series with the NFL heading into the completion of the merger of the two leagues. The Chiefs almost played the Browns in their second Super Bowl trip, but Cleveland fell 27-7 to the Vikings in the NFC (NFL) Championship Game. The Browns, with a diversified offense filled with talent, would have been a much more challenging foe for the Chiefs than the Vikings, whose offense resembled something that appeared to have been designed in the Stone Age.

I was in junior high school when all that was going on. They don’t even call it junior high school anymore. It’s now middle school. That’s how long it’s been.

Enough is enough of this missing out on the Super Bowl.

It’s high time — well past high time, in fact — that the Browns do more than just getting close to making it to the Super Bowl. Instead, they need to actually get there — before they change the name of middle school to something else. We old people — those in the eighth grade class of 1970 — aren’t getting younger.

Steve King