Christmas Eve 2016 finds the Cleveland Browns on the brink of immortality.
At 0-14, the Browns are just two losses away from a perfectly awful season _ and one of those final lumps of coal in a fan's stocking will likely come Saturday afternoon at home against the San Diego Chargers.
It wasn't always this grim at Christmastime.
You have to travel back more than three decades for this particular tale of a very merry Christmas for Browns fans.
Fresh off a late-game field goal winning kick off Don Cockroft's foot to defeat the Cincinnati Bengals just three days earlier, Christmas Eve 1980 found the Browns with the team's first division title in nine years _ winning a divisional tiebreaker over the Houston Oilers (today's Tennessee Titans).
Jeff Kinzbach, who was one of the top radio personalities in all of Northeast Ohio taking roost at the time at the Buzzard's WMMS, remembers it well.
The Kardiac Kids _ so named for the team's late-game heroics _ were the toast of the town.
The Twelve Days Of A Cleveland Brown Christmas, a novelty earworm song by the group Elliott, Walter & Bennett, dominated the radio airwaves.
The vinyl single sold out as fast as copies could be pressed.
So it was up to radio personalities like Kinzbach to play the "heck" out of the song to satisfy demand.
"We'd play the song, then 10 minutes later someone would call in and ask us to play it again," he recalled. "The 12 Days of a Cleveland Brown Christmas was the perfect song at the perfect time."
The song was a takeoff of the classic the Twelve Days of Christmas, but in this Browns-centric version it featured things then-Browns owner Art Modell gave to fans.
The gifts under the tree that season ranged from "Doug Dieken blocking" to the "Kardiac Kids a-winning" to "Brian Sipe a-passing."
All this "on a (Sam) Rutigliano Super Bowl Team."
But Cleveland fans would have to wait until this year for the NBA's Cavaliers to finally deliver a national championship to Northeast Ohio; the Oakland Raiders defeated the Browns 14-12 in the AFC Divisional Playoffs on a play that _ like the song _ lives on in Cleveland folklore.
On a bitterly cold Jan. 4, 1981, the Browns dream season came to a close in the waning moments when instead of setting up for a field goal attempt, Rutigliano sent in the pass play "Red Right 88" that ended with a wind-whipped throw intended for Ozzie Newsome intercepted in the end zone.
Like most Browns fans still around who witnessed the play, Kinzbach still feels the heartache.
He said there was something special about that team beyond the winning record because many of the players were just "stand up" guys who were out in the community and would frequently make appearances on the various radio shows and even at a nightclub that he partly owned in the Flats at the time.
"There were so many great players," Kinzbach said. "There were so many great personalities, too."
Now ruling over the morning airwaves at Akron's WONE, Kinzbach said, he can't think of another Northeast Ohio-centric song _ Christmas or otherwise _ that was as big and as popular as The 12 Days of a Cleveland Brown Christmas.
"There is no novelty song bigger than this _ even today," he said. "This song was through the roof."
