The End.

"I guess you have to go through a lot of nightmares before you find your dream."
~LeBron James, after Game 6

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The end.

Of the series, of the seed, of the season, of the coach, of the good ol' days, of the era. The Cleveland Cavaliers of the last seven years have been forcibly folded, and every kid with a LeBron jersey or Varejao wig just completed his rite of passage into Cleveland fan adulthood.

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I was 12 years old in 1995. The best baseball team the town had seen since stadium sodas cost a nickel mowed through the regular season on the strength of their homegrown players, merrily bashing homer after homer, all the way up to the World Series. They lost, to a team with better pitching. That was when 12-year-old me learned the axiom, "Great defense beats great offense." I didn't get it. I was inconsolable, and I cried for hours.

The following December, I was at the final home game at old Cleveland Stadium. The Browns had largely stunk for most of my memory, but when I saw the fires in the Dawg Pound, the effigies of Art Modell hanging from nooses and on skewers, the rows of seats being ripped out, I was inconsolable, and I cried for hours.

In 1997, the boys of summer once again were teetering on the edge of glory. I seem to remember that it was exactly midnight when Jose Mesa allowed the tying run, and I could barely keep my eyes open as the deciding base hit bounced over Charley Nagy's straining arm. I was inconsolable, and I cried for hours.

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I was a little crybaby back then. Ask anyone, it's true; it didn't take much adversity to set my younger self to tears. Now here I am, all grown up, and I have tears in my beard, phlegm in my moustache, bleary red eyes behind my glasses. The feeling is all too familiar, and yet it's worse now than it ever was before.

We were supposed to win.

We had the best player, maybe ever. We were the team everyone was gunning for, the team that had expectations. We glutted our payroll, we played through injuries, we did everything a championship team was supposed to do...until we didn't. Our best player had a couple bad nights. We got out-coached and out-hustled. Older players found a fountain of youth, and an old nemesis had the last laugh. It was, in nearly every way possible, the most painful end imaginable to the season of our greatest hope.

My throat hurts from shouting at the TV. My forehead hurts from slapping it over and over. Right now, I don't want to see a basketball again for a long time. I don't want to watch the rest of the playoff; I don't even want to accidentally catch a part of a game at a bar. But, in the end, this story isn't about basketball. It's about faith. Hope. Pain. Adrenaline. And the briefest, fleeting glimpses of pure joy. All those things that make being a Cleveland fan so much like being a member of a congregation of true believers (you might call it a cult) are thrown into the sharpest relief, right now, at the moment of our greatest despair.
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The LeBron James era was (let's make peace with that past tense) the best time I've had watching sports of any kind, period. There are no adjectives left to describe his play that haven't already been used a dozen times, to better effect, by better writers than me. Every real sports fan appreciates a transcendent talent, but only a select few get to cheer for the very best in the game, night in and night out, for years on end. And it's the rarest thing of all to see a kid from the neighborhood carve his name into the stone alongside the greats, in front of his hometown supporters. That's what we got to see these past seven years.

Are any of these platitudes working for you? Is it all meaningless without that banner, without the chance to throw a handful of confetti at the conquering heroes, without finally seeing the eternal bridesmaid step to the altar? Congratulations, you're one of us. You watched a prodigy from Akron become the face of Cleveland. You lived and died with his team. You invested your hopes, your dreams, your money, your faith, part of your very being in the outcome of his ballgames. And now, his contract is up, and the last thing he heard from the home crowd was disbelieving, utterly disappointed booing. Job himself couldn't script it any better.

In a grotesque way, the Cavs' collapse lends a sort of symmetry to Cleveland sports misery: each of our franchises has found a unique way to break our hearts in the last 15 years. And yet, we'll be back. Oh yes, we'll be back in droves. The second the Browns show a glimmer of life (and probably even if they don't), you won't be able to sell an organ to get a ticket. When the next crop of Indians youngsters starts showing life, you'll dangle from the nosebleeds at Progressive field with peanuts and crackerjack. And when the Cavs organization picks up the pieces and starts pushing that rock back up the hill, you'll be there. I know I will.

Welcome to the club, brother. Support groups meet on Sundays afternoons in the fall and weekday evenings the rest of the year. See you at the game.