As we struggle to survive another season with the new-era Browns, one way we can try to get through it (besides alcohol or heavy medication) is to look back at the best individual weeks of the Browns’ new era to remember times in recent memory when this particular week didn’t suck.

Just like you’ll never forget the time you fell chest-first onto a picket fence, you’ll never be able to forget how the new Browns debuted. What with all the scarring and psychological trauma in both instances, that is.

Though it didn’t start out that way on that September night in 1999. It was emotional, it was exciting, it was optimistic. Then the game began, and, like Mike Holmgren, all of those things very quickly went away.

Steelers 43, Browns 0 was the final, and it wasn’t anywhere near that close.

That night we learned just how pornographic expansion football is. What often gets forgotten in the bloody aftermath of that loss is what happened the next time the Browns and Steelers played. It was a miracle that ranked right up there with the Wedding at Cana, an experience that may have made the evisceration of opening night worth going through.

That first loss was the beginning of a seven-game losing streak to start the Browns’ 1999 season. And even after they picked up their first win, things only got worse. In the Baltimore Ravens’ first trip to Cleveland, the Browns played horribly - even by their mongoloid expansion standards - and lost by 32 points to a crummy Baltimore team.

Seven days later, in Week 10, the Browns embarked to Pittsburgh, where they had a history of being abused even when they were good. Considering the Browns had been annihilated by the now-5-3 Steelers on their own home field, Cleveland fans were cowering with the expectation of what would happen on the haunted plastic turf of Three Rivers Stadium.

The Browns showed a glimmer of improvement when they sprinted 80 yards in five plays in the game’s opening minutes and took a 7-0 lead on a 35-yard touchdown pass from Tim Couch to Kevin Johnson. But that was pretty much it for the offense for the next two-and-a-half hours as it took what we now call a “Shurmur Shnooze.”

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There’s very little that we can do about it.

As I sat with my fellow Marines in that middle school lunch room, we knew that we would be able to do nothing if some juvenile delinquent decided to dump a tray of food on one of us.  Sure, some ballsy pre-adolescent would face a series of consequences, but it would serve as little consolation for being humiliated during our efforts to provide community service of some sort at that northern Georgia institute of learning.  Of course, the children were completely respectful, no such incident occurred, but it got me thinking.

How fortunate I was to not be that victim of incessant bullying in my youth, or as a young member of the military in the south.  Of course, I was forced to pay my dues in the form of being a Browns fan, especially being a Browns fan in the present day.  I’ve never been forced to surrender my lunch money…well, perhaps once, if you’ll allow me to consider that beloved, scrappy team of my youth as “lunch money”.  In that case, Baltimore took my lunch money 17 years ago, and has since pestered me in a way that’s made it difficult to let things go.

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Perhaps having a day to think about the Browns and Ravens game wasn't the best thing that could happen. As this site's "Guy that goes off half-cocked" it may have been better to just spill thoughts and reflections of yesterday's game the minute I had finished watching it and while I was depressed and tired. But that's not how it all came spilling it out when I sat down to put thoughts into words. 

No. That's not at all how it came out. This is:

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Here's something definitive we learned from the Cleveland Browns on Sunday: before you swagger, you have to learn to walk, or throw, catch, or tackle, or, for the love of God, line up correctly.

In the run up to what would become their 10th straight loss (a period that spans 5 years or roughly longer than most celebrity marriages) to the Baltimore Ravens, all the talk around Berea was that the team had a new found sense of confidence and swagger, that they were closing the gap on their AFC rivals.

It's hard to imagine a team that has won 5 or more games just twice in the last 10 years, a team that goes through regime change like a banana republic, a team with a 29 year old rookie quarterback, a team that once again leads the league in dropped passed and blown coverages, a team so irrelevant that its highlights are relegated to 30 second blips on SportsCenter and Football Night in America, a team that is so shaky

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