2024 – Our Time! Browns offseason begins!

My Browns Family, 

 

A friend shared a question to me once while I was enjoying my time at one of the first Cleveland Browns’ tailgate I ever attended. It was at the W 3rd and Summit gathering under the bridge. It made me stop and think about fans, social media and our Browns connections.

“If you gathered all of your friends from “Twitter” now “X” at that specific moment, would you move them all into your neighborhood?”

I stopped to think about this. Would I? Even the crazy bots? Is this something I need? Would others do the same? Could this even work?

But the more I pondered, I knew this: In my perfect universe we would all be neighbors, everyone would be friends and everyone would want to hang out with one another. So in a strange way … YES!

Professional Life

Sadly, my professional life taught me a different story. One of the smartest people I ever met on this planet taught me not all Tribes or even scientists are all friends. You would think in my nerd-a-verse it was all peace, love, and joy.

 

Even the smartest people have a hard time articulating feelings, which is something else I’ve come to understand greatly in my 41 years. We shouldn’t have to choose at any point in our lives who the good guys are or who the bad guys are. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work the way my perfect one does.

 

We are all cheering for the same team, players, and outcome. I never want to come off as someone who knows more than anyone else because I certainly do not. But we fans all need to be supportive of one another AND our team! It was a hard lesson to learn in my medical research world, namely that my peers in research wanted different outcomes.

As humans I know we all want the same things: to feel safe, to feel comfortable and have a reliable support system. Clearly that’s where the old saying came about: “Trust your gut.” I am still riding the high off this big, Browns regular season … a happy mindset. This exhilaration is nature’s way of rewarding our brains exactly with what it needs. Happens every time something wonderful in our lives occurs. Funny how we humans think we know much. But we really know very little. 

Yet I know that MY friends have this same excitement from the season. This roller-coaster year of anticipation, injury, frustration, doom, then unbelievable happiness from unexpected finds like D-HOPand Flacco–fever!

Schleprock!

For so long Browns fans have had a gloomy cloud following them around. A feeling that Cleveland’s favorite electrophysiologist is well too familiar with. Becoming a Browns fan while working for one of their favorite sponsors made me understand what kind of family I was joining and how my world fits in with my fellow fans.

 

I was able to make biomedical science accessible to a very science positive Browns player, our former fullback, Johnny Stanton. He took time out of his busy schedule to help me collect data that to this day is still used and cited in an academic journal article. Johnny’s assistance helped explain the science behind keto diets!

This scientific knowledge-base helps explain how positive events in our lives (dieting, in this case) can affect us all in a comforting, healthy manner. It gives us a sense of joy and safety, too. We relish belonging to a group bigger than just me or you or your neighbor. It’s not the east side, west side, and south suburbs. It’s fans from the East Coast, West Coast, South of the border, our Canadian friends and our fellow fans across the pond!

 

And as the off season begins, this joy and nervous anticipation in me (and I imagine my Browns family) has strengthened my resolve with my social family and Browns Clan! To be there for each person. To listen. Laugh. Cheer. Maybe share food, a drink and a memory.

 

Let’s band together in support of this team as we ride a hopefully short offseason. We’ve had enough of Schlep-rock clouds, sadness, and despair to last a lifetime. 

 

To misquote Herb Brooks from the 1980 US Men’s Hockey team for 2024 and the Super Bowl, LIX in New Orleans:

 

“This is OUR TIME, Browns fans.”

 

Let’s get it!

 

Please follow me on X at:

@BrownsFanGurl