It just comes naturally.

In fact, I don’t even have to think about it anymore.

That is, every time I mention — or write — the name of the longtime Browns radio play-by-play announcer, I refer to him as the great Jim Donovan. Not just Jim Donovan, mind, you, but the great Jim Donovan.

He is exactly that, this man who recently announced that he was retiring after almost 40 years from his job as the sports director at Cleveland’s WKYC-TV, Channel

3.

If he is going to call it a day with one aspect of his career, thankfully he has chosen the TV job. It’s just a few minutes each weeknight with his sport reports, and then a half-hour afterwards as the host of the station’s 7 o’clock newscast, “Front Row.”

That’s bad enough for all of us out there in TV land, but for all of us out in radio land — two similar, though different lands, with the two lands involving the same group of people — we still have the much bigger part of his career, and the most exciting, with his decision to continue doing Browns games. When he retires from his football job and he goes away completely, for good, now, then, that will be a much bigger loss and will be a seminal moment. What he did with his announcement the other day is just a pre-cursor, or an opening act, to that main event. We’ll worry about that later. As former Indians pitcher Satchel Paige, whose life and times have been brought back into the forefront with Major League Baseball’s recent decision to incorporate the Negro League statistics into its own, used to say when he would meander in from the bullpen as a reliever into a dicey situation in a tight game in the late innings in that 1948 world championship season, upon being told by an umpire to pick up the pace so as to speed up the game, “There’s no use rushing into trouble.”

We’re very lucky in these parts — and we have been for decades — when it comes to our sports teams’ radio play-by-by announcers.

With the Guardians, there’s the great Tom Hamilton, whose calls of “A swing and a drive . . . ” can cause you to smile and get emotional, both at the same time. Tuning in to him on long summer car rides is like listening to a baseball melody, a veritable album of your favorite sounds. Call it,  “The Greatest Hits of the great Tom Hamilton,” or just, “Hamilton.”

With the Ohio State Buckeyes in football and basketball, there’s the great Paul Keels, whose deep tenor makes him sound like “the voice of God.” He could read the phone book to you and you’d listen. He was fantastic when he did a Browns game last season while Donovan was recuperating during his leukemia battle. You would expect nothing less, right?

With the Cavaliers, there used to be the great Joe Tait. When I need to have chills go up and down my spine, I recall his exciting, scintillating, spellbinding description of the final two possessions of Game 7 of the 1976 Eastern Conference semifinals against the Washington Bullets in the “Miracle of Richfield” season.

With the Browns for 24 years beginning in 1961, there was the great Gib Shanley, from tiny Shadyside, Ohio, the home of Don Fleming, whose 46 is one of five jersey numbers retired by the Browns. His ability to paint a precisely accurate picture of what he was seeing  — “The nose of the football is touching the 46, so we’ll call it second and a short four;“ “Collins flanked eight to the left, Warfield split seven to the right, Morin tight at right end” — that you could envision exactly what was going on even though the home games were not on TV anywhere then because of the NFL’s restrictive blackout rules.

Immediately after “The Gibber” was the great Nev Chandler, who grew up in Rocky River listening to Shanley and as such painted accurate pictures, too. As former Browns longtime media relations director Kevin Byrne once said, “When NFL Films would come in and do the highlight film on us for the season, they would tell me when they were syncing up a touchdown play with the radio call, ‘Your guy (Chandler) was right on point. When he said a player was on the 5 yard-line, he was exactly on the 5 yard-line.’ “ And by the way, Chandler’s touchdown calls were the football equivalent of Hamilton’s home run calls. As his longtime partner and color analyst, Doug Dieken, told me, “I saw Nev make only one mistake in all the time I worked with him. He said on a punt, ‘It’s a high, wobbly, low line-drive kick.’ He knew immediately that he had messed up. He didn’t look at me, and I sure as anything wasn’t going to look at him. He prided himself on beonh right. The booth was his office, and he was in full charge of it.”

And finally, still on the job is the great Donovan. He is a mix of a lot of different announcers, including all those we’ve mentioned, in that he can adjust his mood and style to the moment and exactly what is needed, being serious and then silly, dramatic and then deadpan, and whimsical and then wired for sound. Said Dieken, who worked 24 years with Donovan, “Jimmy is just the best.”

And since Jim Donovan will, thank goodness, continue calling games, possibly the best is yet to come.

Man, wouldn’t that be great to listen to?

Steve King