Another Super Bowl – this one will be No. 50 – and the Browns will once again not be going when it’s played in 13 days.

But we’ve known that would be the case for a long time, in essence before the regular season even began. It wasn’t going to be in the cards.

Instead, it’s the Carolina Panthers, who were born the year the original Browns franchise played its last season in Cleveland in 1995, and the Browns’ old nemesis from the last half of the 1980s, the Denver Broncos, who are going.

So there’s a lot of joy in Denver and Charlotte today. It’s all anyone that anyone there is talking about, really.

Cleveland, Northeast Ohio and Browns fans need to experience that kind of exhilaration sometime sooner rather than later. In fact, making that happen is what new head coach Hue Jackson is ultimately charged with.

It’s not getting the Browns turned around, although that’s the immediate goal.

It’s not making them a winning team, although that’s the next goal.

It’s not getting them into the playoffs, although that’s the goal after that.

It’s getting them to the Super Bowl. Actually, it’s making them Super Bowl champions, but simply making it to the big game would be a seminal accomplishment. Then once that’s done – getting there, that is — the pressure will begin mounting for them to win it.

That’s what this is all about in pro sports, to be the last man standing. Anything short of that is a failure if that’s all the further a team ever gets in any coaching tenure.

The Cavaliers’ David Blatt found that out last Friday. The ultimate goal is not to play hard and make it to the Finals, but to win them.

By a long shot, the Browns aren’t there yet. They’re still doing “part of the process,” a phrase that fans loathe if the process never makes progress. Former head coach Mike Pettine, and the others before him in this expansion era, looked at managing the process as it it were hoisting the Lombardi Trophy high above their heads while seal brown and orange confetti rained down. That’s why they’re no longer employed.

Jackson said he “came here to win.” He didn’t mean games. He meant THE game – the last one that is played.

That was good to hear. It means he gets it.

So Browns fans will sit back and watch not just the process play out, but how fast it happens. For a fan base that’s been waiting as long as this one has, there is no patience for a slow, drawn-out experience.

Sure, everybody knows it’s going to take time and as such is willing to give Jackson enough of it, just not an endless amount of it. At some point, his work must bear the ultimate fruit.

There is optimism that Jackson is the right man for the job. And if he is, then he will be the most popular guy in these parts, for as former Browns head coach Sam Rutigliano always likes to say, “When things are good, it’s never better anywhere than it is in Cleveland.”