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Howdy, folks!

My name is Steve Mullett, and I'm a 36-year-old Cleveland sports fan. Anyone who fits that basic description will surely recognize the inherent frustration involved; anyone else who's been paying attention to sports in general for the last 30 to 40 years can undoubtedly figure it out.

Cleveland's last championship was in 1964. That Browns team was led by Frank Ryan and Jim Brown, and won a 27-0 upset over the Baltimore Colts in the NFL Championship. But Baltimore got its revenge by stealing that team from us 31 years later. In any case, it was seven years before I was born, and while I appreciate the victory on some level, I wasn't there to experience it.

I've seen my teams reach the championship round three times now — the Indians in '95 and '97, the Cavaliers in '07. The Cavs were in those games against the Spurs, but they didn't win any of them. And nobody really expected them to have a chance against Duncan & Co. Ironically, they've now beaten San Antonio in four straight regular-season games. Too bad they can't flip-flop those results!

The Mark Price-Brad Daugherty-Larry Nance Cavaliers of the late 1980s and early 1990s were a fine team, but a fellow by the name of Jordan kept them out of the NBA Finals. How many damned times have I seen that clip of him hitting "The Shot" over Craig Ehlo? How many times must I see it? Everyone who played in that game is retired. I hereby beg the people who run TV networks to stop inflicting it upon me.

The Tribesmen acquitted themselves pretty well in those two series, but they lost them both to what I will always believe were inferior teams. Those '95 Braves had a lot of talent, but any team that has Manny Ramirez and Jim Thome hitting sixth and seventh ought to win a World Series. And I might add, they led the American League in ERA that year, with a strong rotation that included near-Hall of Famers Dennis Martinez and Orel Hershiser. And Jose Mesa, in his first year as a closer, had one of the 10 best seasons any closer has ever had.

But '97 was the worst. There is no way those Marlins were better than our Tribe. It was with bitter irony that we Clevelanders watched Dave Dombrowski demolish that team after they pulled that series out of their backsides. These 11 years hence, I no longer hold the aforementioned Mr. Mesa personally responsible for letting that one slip away, but the fact is, he blew the biggest save of his life. He'd struggled that year, and I remember thinking, as the game went into the ninth, that I didn't think he was going to be able to hold it. The Jose Mesa of 1995 would have slammed the door on the Marlins. The Jose Mesa of 1997 couldn't do it.

And then there's the Browns. No, they still haven't reached a Super Bowl. Had the Super Bowl started two years earlier than it did, they'd have played in Super Bowl I, but of course, there's no point contemplating that. It was before my time anyway. The Browns of my teen years had their chances, though. Boy howdy, did they ever. I don't hate John Elway, as many of my fellow Browns fans do, but I have to admit, whenever I see his toothy face, I feel just a little bit like punching it.

No other city has such sporting heartache, certainly during my lifetime, anyway. In addition to The Shot, we have The Drive and The Fumble (relating to those awful Elway-Kosar battles of the 1980s), and of course, Red Right 88. Leading up to this past Sunday's frigid NFC Championship in Green Bay, ESPN ran a graphic of five notable playoff games played in extreme cold. Every one of them featured a team in a cold-weather city against a team from a warm-weather city. Every one of them was won by the home team except one — the Browns, in the Red Right 88 game against Al Davis' Oakland Raiders. That was in January 1981, and I was nine years old. I thought I'd never feel such pain as a sports fan again. Little did I know.

When the Indians blew a three-games-to-one lead over the Red Sox in the 2007 ALCS, I have to admit, part of me didn't care. But how will I feel when one of my teams finally wins it all? It will happen, sooner or later. It must. I will go to my grave convinced that last year's Tribe would have swept the Rockies in much the same fashion as those Red Sox did.

So this blog is going to be mostly about Cleveland sports. There will be the occasional post about Ohio State (the one team I root for that has actually won a title -- and in extremely thrilling fashion, at that), and I will dabble in observances from around the sporting world. I will certainly blog about college hockey very soon, as my alma mater, Miami of Ohio, has about as good a team as anybody this year. But it'll be very heavily about the Indians, Browns and Cavaliers, because that's who I watch the most.

I hope you enjoy it.