Justice B. Hill

CLEVELAND - Bob Madden sighs. He wants to believe. Oh, does he want to believe — to believe deep inside his body where feelings like these have only caused him four decades of heartbreak.

Madden, a longtime Cleveland sports fan, frets about whether he should expose him to more of it.

“You wanna be optimistic, but you’re afraid to go there,” he says. “It’s hard to explain.”

Not for people who have Cleveland roots. For they share Madden’s sentiments. They worry about investing too much emotional capital in LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Yeah, fans hear the hype; it surrounds them. This time, a Cleveland team won’t break their hearts. This time, a Cleveland team will bring home a championship. This time ...

But the city has had other times like this one. It has had others teams and other years when Clevelanders were tantalizingly close to celebrating a title. Close so often that, well, they fear another team, another athlete and another agonizingly painful moment in sports history will rock their world anew.

“We know the history of the fans: what they went through — like the John Elway 99-yard touchdown drive or Michael Jordan pulling up from the free-throw line and ending our season, and Jose Mesa not being able to close out the ninth,” James says. “They know the stories.

“We stick together. It's a great bond between me and these fans that we have here.”

In LeBron they must trust.

The disappointments
Other athletes have been heartthrobs — the toast of the town. Other teams have bonded with the city. But not since the 1964 Browns has a team brought a title to Cleveland.

Now, it’s the Cavs the city wants to spend its emotions on. They are the hopes of fans that have little else on the sports landscape here to pride themselves in.

How could they?

In the early ’90s, they saw the city of Baltimore steal their Browns. The NFL let the city keep the team’s name and awarded Cleveland a new franchise.

“The Browns are the first love of this town,” says Daryl Ruiter, a sports reporter and sports producer for WKNR, 850 AM.

The league should have kept ’em. For these Browns look like a mirror image of the Detroit Lions, a sad-sack franchise with a track record of ineptitude that only the Los Angeles Clippers rival.

And then there are the Indians, once the talk of the town.

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Oh, the Tribe — a franchise without a title since 1948. With lousy management and tightfisted owners, the Indians have better odds of sailing a kayak around the world than of winning a World Series.

Neither they nor the Browns have a megastar, a player whose appeal transcends the city.

The Cavs do: LeBron James. He alone offers Clevelanders a reason to be optimistic — to dream a delicious dream.

“At the same time, it’s cautious optimism,” says Ruiter, a Cleveland native. “They have seen time and time again, quote, ‘great teams’ not finish when it comes time to winning a championship.”

Ruiter remembers the pall that hung over the city like thunderclouds after the 1997 World Series. The champagne was on ice in the clubhouse, and thoughts of a ticker-tape parade down Euclid Avenue, the epicenter of the city’s downtown corridor, were dancing in people’s minds.

But a misplayed groundball by Tony Fernandez in the 11th inning led to a loss, not a victory. The loss crushed people’s spirits. Tears flowed, not champagne.