In my never-ending effort this week to make you feel at least a little better as another rotten Browns season in this rotten expansion era gets ready to a grind to a halt lateSunday afternoon at Heinz Field against the Pittsburgh Steelers, I bring you yet another entry from sportsillustrated.com.

In the Dec. 22 “Extra Mustard” column on the site was a lengthy tribute to Dick Enberg. There were clips of several of the late, great sportscaster’s best calls, including that of the Browns’ two AFC Championship Game losses to the Denver Broncos following the 1986 and ’87 regular seasons.

Whoa! Wait a minute!

Yes, yes, of course I know that those were heartbreaking defeats. But at the same time, those two Browns seasons were fantastic overall and those clips were remembrances of that. They were thrilling and thoroughly enjoyable. The fans loved the Browns, and the Browns loved the fans. It was a match made in heaven – a love affair the likes of which most NFL cities have never enjoyed.

Browns football was incredible. Sunday afternoons were just the best. They were more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.

I am firmly convinced to this day – without any shadow of a doubt, and thinking with my head and not my heart — that the Browns were the better team both times. They weren’t the better team when the clubs met again in the 1989 conference title contest, but they were the previous two times.

Really.

Truly.

I mean it with every fiber of my being.

They just didn’t finish the job.

And you’ve got to finish the job. As those Browns and their longtime fans – the ones who remember those teams, those seasons and those games – now know all too well, painfully so, the most important part of the job is finishing it to the very end.

The fans of the rival Pittsburgh Steelers, who host the Browns on Sunday in the regular-season finale, are the ones getting to enjoy those special moments now.

Yikes!

That’s almost as sobering as those two last-second losses to the Broncos three decades ago.