Written by Jonathan Knight

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We missed a chance last week, gang.

We could have ended this whole thing here and now. The 47-year-old title drought we know as reality here in the Best Location in the Nation could have been wiped out like Amy Winehouse (oooh...too soon?).

I’m not referring to a game the limping Indians gave away or a move the Browns did or didn’t make or the tryouts for the 2011-12 Cavalier Girls.

I’m talking about Buffett. Jimmy Buffett.

He was in town last week for the first time in seven years, rocking a sold-out Blossom Music Center and bringing his laid-back, tropical-flavored awesomeness to an amazingly wide cross-section of Northeast Ohio folks.

You may be sitting there scratching your head, wondering what in the world Jimmy Buffett has to do with ending the 24/7 unanesthetized periodontal surgery that is Cleveland sports.

In reality, nothing. Except that he’s the only person in the world who can deliver a world title to Cleveland.

Let’s flash back to the last time he was here, that non-fateful, completely forgettable summer of 2004. Two months after Jimmy was here, he closed his summer tour on a September weekend in Boston with a unique concert at Fenway Park, which had just begun to be used as a concert venue for the first time in more than 30 years.

Halfway through the Fenway concert, a portly actor in an old-fashioned, pinstriped baseball uniform was cued and strutted out onto the stage.

“Uh-oh,” Jimmy warned his audience. “It’s the Curse of the Bambino!”

The only boos of the night cascaded through the ancient ballpark, followed by a spontaneous chant of “Yankees suck!”

Picking up a baseball bat, Jimmy then asked the most rhetorical question in New England history: “I think it’s time we got rid of this curse, what do you think?”

The crowd roared in agreement as another gentleman dressed like a native Pacific Islander - to symbolize the Jolly Mon from one of Jimmy’s more famous ballads  - took the stage.

“We’re gonna knock the shit out of this curse right now!”

The Jolly Mon then lobbed four balls to Jimmy, which he batted into the crowd.

“It’s out of here now!” Jimmy screamed to his roaring fans.

The concert continued without further mention of the Jolly Mon ceremony until the end, when Jimmy was handing out props to everyone who helped put the concert together. Almost as an afterthought, he hollered, “We’ll see you in the World Series, Red Sox!”

Five weeks later, the Red Sox completed an epic comeback in the American League Championship Series, rallying from a three-game deficit to finally give the Yankees, those lovable sociopaths of professional sports, what they truly deserved. A week after that, Boston won its first World Series in 86 years.

For as much as has been written and celebrated about that remarkable autumn, Jimmy Buffett’s musical exorcism often gets lost. People often try to point to what prompted the almost religious experience and fail to mention Jimmy’s role in probably the greatest sports story of the decade.

Put simply: Jimmy had never played in Fenway Park before, and following the concert and his little voodoo ceremony, the Red Sox instantly won the World Series.

That made Jimmy Buffett one-for-one in the casting off of demons, topping Max von Sydow, who couldn’t quite finish the job in his only at-bat in 1973.

For all of the efforts by Red Sox Nation through the years to thwart the Curse of the Bambino - from pulling up Babe Ruth’s old piano from the bottom of a lake to creative priests sprinkling Fenway with holy water from a blessed cherry picker - none of them worked.

But Jimmy Buffett did. And considering the zaniness of the curse and how it ended, it seems only fitting that the catalyst that prompted its conclusion was something completely bizarre.

Jimmy was in Northeast Ohio last week for the first time since he came through for Boston seven years ago, and we dropped the ball. We had a priest over to the Amityville Horror house for dinner and didn’t ask him to fix it.

But maybe that was for the best. I fear Blossom, essentially placed in somebody’s backyard somewhere between Richfield and the forest moon of Endor, is a bit too remote even for Jimmy Buffett’s powers. Maybe a ceremony held at Blossom would help Akron win another national title in soccer or Kent State get back to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, but downtown Cleveland is just a rumor out there. We’ve got to get him in the belly of the beast.

And sadly, we had him there once before and didn’t take advantage of it then, either.

In the orgasmic summer of 1995, Jimmy Buffett gave the first concert ever at Jacobs Field. (In fact, the memories of that concert remain woven with our reflections of the ’95 postseason. If you watch highlights from late in the season or the playoffs, you’ll notice a large, rectangular patch of yellow, singed grass in left field damaged during the concert.)

Watching the ’95 Indians either beat the hell out of teams or rally for incredible victories in their last at-bat night after night (and not yet knowing of Jimmy Buffett’s magical powers), we didn’t ask him to perform some sort of exorcism. That August, who would have thought we needed one? We thought, justifiably, that destiny was already on our side.

Now we know better, and that yellow-singed portion of grass on the old highlight films is like a Scarlet Letter for our Hester Prynne. Now we know we need to bring Jimmy back.

My only concern is whether or not Jimmy Buffett’s sorcery can cover an entire city, not just one haunted franchise.

After all, the Red Sox were just one cursed team. Cleveland’s got three.

Maybe next year we can book him at Progressive Field. Or better yet, three separate concerts, one at each Cleveland sports venue. And when he’s here, we’ll just casually ask if he could use some of his Parrothead juju to get us out of this mess.

And of course, because he’s Jimmy, he’ll do it.

Think of it - Peyton Hillis up on stage with a lei and a grass skirt, stiff-arming the backup singers. Kyrie Irving no-looking coconuts into the crowd. Chris Perez going solo on “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and then smashing his acoustic guitar after missing a chord.

Difficult to coordinate? Sure. Expensive? Perhaps. But totally worth it. And hey, we can use the money we got from The Avengers.

But neither cash nor logistics should be an issue. We’re talking about preventing our children from experiencing the misery we’ve endured and rescuing an entire culture from the depths of ongoing depression. And getting drunk in public.

No doubt there will be those who argue that this is utterly ridiculous, that there’s no connection between Jimmy Buffett and the destiny of Cleveland sports, just as there was no link between Jimmy Buffett and the death of the Curse of the Bambino. Or that there was no link between the Watergate break-in and Richard Nixon being a complete psychotic dick.

Those folks would claim we have five decades of bad ownership and poor personnel decisions to blame. But if we don’t ask for some mystical help in getting out of this, as Jimmy Buffett himself would say, it’s our own damn fault.