Long before they lost the NBA Finals on their home court, I knew the Cleveland Cavaliers would devolve into a stumbling, bumbling mess; I knew that the guy who really is the best player in the world (even if he’s also a narcissistic jackass who killed all his hometown fans on national television and then expected all those zombie corpses to take him back four years later, which of course we did) would lose to the team led by a smirking, failed mouthguard model who looks like he’s out way past his curfew.

Forget it, LeBron, it’s Cleveland. Home of: The Drive. The Fumble. The Shot. I’ve heard all the jokes. They’re not funny anymore. It’s not because Cleveland’s sports teams don’t deserve ridicule. It’s because the jokes are too easy. And at some point in the recent past, the knee-slappers turned into something darker. There’s a dagger in those voices now, plunged a little deeper by every TV network that orders its production assistants to whip up a fresh montage showing all of Cleveland’s failures over the last 50 years, in order to play that package in pre-game coverage, during timeouts, and also as part of the post-game show, in case anyone missed it the first dozen times. Sometimes they also include footage of the Cuyahoga River engulfed in flames, just to put a fine point on it.

Here’s something else I knew last night before it happened: I wouldn’t sleep well. I’d remain awake, twisted up in frustration. I knew it because it’s what happens every time I’m dumb enough to believe in the Cavs, or the Indians, or especially the Browns. Here’s a story: In the fall of 1988, I was in fifth grade, and my entire school was singing cheesy cover songs about the Browns. “We’re Going to the Super Bowl” to the tune of Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” and so forth. Realize that this was after enduring the previous two years of heartbreaking post-season losses to the Broncos. We were all under a mass delusion. Surely it couldn’t happen again. Of course it did. The Browns lost at home on Christmas Eve to the Oilers in the Wild Card Game, and when class resumed in January, the mood at school was darker than the day three years earlier when we’d all just watched the Challenger explode.

I haven’t learned. My daughter was born in the fall of 2007, after the first time LeBron led the cast of a touring company production of Les Misérables to the NBA Finals, and lost. Unfazed, I bought her a little pink Indians onesie and sat her on my knee as the Tribe took it to the Yankees, impossibly, in that year’s postseason; I laughed gleefully as a bunch of crazy bugs attacked Joba Chamberlain on the mound in the best display of home-field advantage I’d ever seen. Later, during our inevitable ALCS collapse against the Red Sox, my daughter was kept away from me, for her own good. (FYI, 2007 was also the year the Browns went 10-6—their best record of the past 20 years—and missed the playoffs.) After losses, I have thrown TV remotes against the floor, shattering them into a million little pieces. I have shouted obscenities loudly enough to wake everyone in the house. I have bitterly wished for death—both for the opposing players and for myself.