CLEVELAND, Ohio - A newspaper box offering a window to the past sits in my home office.

The framed final edition of the National Sports Daily hangs nearby. The headline - "We Had A Ball - The Fat Lady Sings Our Song" - is a reminder of the circumstances that brought me to Cleveland in 1991 to write for The Plain Dealer.

Don't ask me how I came to possess such a newspaper box, officer. Let's just say it may have involved an overzealous co-worker, a dark and stormy Chicago night, a van, a snort of Jack Daniels and a pair of bolt cutters.

A few months later, I walked from a downtown Cleveland hotel with my bride of 10 days to attend our first Cleveland sports event together. I'd been here a few times for Steelers-Browns games, spending those weekends with a college roommate in Ohio City sipping beers and listening to Pete Franklin.

(Yes, we really knew how to have a good time back in our day.)

I'd told my wife Cleveland was a tremendous sports town and a good place for somebody in my profession to land. Left unsaid: especially so when an alternative landing spot was the unemployment line.

We walked to the old stadium to watch the afternoon part of a makeup doubleheader between Milwaukee and the Indians. It was Tuesday, Oct. 1. The season would be over in a few days (also known as not soon enough).

The Indians would finish with 105 losses - still a team record. The good news? - No one was getting bruised by stray elbows going through the turnstiles.

The lineup that day: Alex Cole, Mike Aldrete, Carlos Baerga, Carlos Martinez, Mark Whiten, Reggie Jefferson, Jim Thome, Ed Taubensee, Felix Fermin. And on the hill Rod Nichols was about to see his record fall to 2-11.

The score: Milwaukee 11, Indians 0. The attendance? On baseball-reference.com, it claims (optimistically) 4,346. On a box score almost 27 years old, it says "Not Given."

For good reason. Less than three is not a crowd.

My wife? Strangely quiet that day. I asked what was wrong.

My Plain Dealer mug shot from 1991.

"If this is such a great sports town," she said, "why can I hear the pitcher talking to the catcher?"

Within four seasons, the World Series came to Cleveland in a new ballpark with a lineup baseball people were comparing to the old "Murderer's Row" of Yankees fame.

And a girl from Indianapolis was in the seats with her friends, Christmas lights adorning their baseball caps.

Not long after that - at least that's the way it seems now -- I left my wife at home watching a Larry O'Brien Trophy presentation on television and drove to a neighborhood bar where Cavaliers fans of my age linked arms, sobbing and singing a continuous loop of "We Are The Champions."

I know there were quite a few years between 1991 and that. Based on what I see in the mirror, I've shed hair like a Pomeranian.

There have been almost 80 combined seasons among the three teams since I wrote my first story for the PD. There were two World Series Game 7 daggers for the Indians that took years off everyone's lives.

There was Michael Jordan spoiling the Cavs' good time. LeBron James coming and going and coming home again. And now taking over the role of Jordan for the rest of the Eastern Conference.

There were more regime changes in Berea than all third-world countries combined. So many twists and turns and dead ends. And yet it seemed like 1991 to now happened above the Concorde it went by so fast.

Between the losingest season in Indians history and a summer that now offers title hopes for the Cavs and the Indians, and (finally, we think) legitimate hope for the Browns, time flew like an Albert Belle corker.

Kenny Lofton scored from second base on a passed ball in Seattle one minute. The next, Rajai Davis was lining a homer off Aroldis Chapman to tie a World Series game at home against the Cubs.

Turns out time also flies when you're sitting in Lou Groza's living room watching the Cleveland Browns owner brag on the legend of the Baltimore Colts and telling his audience, "I had no choice."

I heard a rumble deep inside Groza that day. I also heard Dante Lavelli's voice boom from behind the washers and dryers at his appliance store, "Shaw, Art Modell has no integrity."

It flies whether James is staging The Decision or co-authoring a Sports Illustrated Valentine to Northeast Ohio. It flies no matter if the Browns owner is Modell, Al Lerner, Randy Lerner or Jimmy Haslam.

(OK, so it did seem to drag a bit during 1-31 and 0-16. Let's not get carried away here.)

I remember writing a column about how fitting it would be for the new Browns to celebrate their return to the NFL after three years of darkness by playing the Pittsburgh Steelers at home in the 1999 season opener.

Absolutely perfect opponent, I wrote. Paying no attention to the 11 names on offense: Ty Detmer, Terry Kirby, Marc Edwards, Kevin Johnson, Leslie Shepherd, Irv Smith, Lomas Brown, Jim Pyne, Dave Wohlabaugh, Scott Rehberg, Orlando Brown. And how little time they'd had to become a passable NFL team.

The NFL agreed scheduling the Steelers was the way to go. At least until that game ended Pittsburgh 43, Browns 0.

The details of the carnage were even more telling. First downs: Steelers, 33, Browns 2; Rushing yards: Steelers 217, Browns 9. Total yards: Steelers 464, Browns 40. Time of possession: Steelers 47:49, Browns 12:11.

I saw Lerner in Berea the next day.

"Great idea," he said with as much good cheer as he could muster under the circumstances.

I wasn't here for the great Browns teams of the 1980s. The Indians' playoff runs of the '90s were the highlight for me in my early days here. I don't believe it's legally possible to have more fun than I had covering baseball with Paul Hoynes, whether it was in spring training in Winter Haven or Goodyear.

Or leaving the Bronx on the subway at 1:30 a.m. with a cast of characters right out of a Fellini film, including a one-legged guy who moved around the car shadow boxing.

We interviewed Mike Hargrove in the visiting manager's office in Chicago the night umpires confiscated Albert Belle's bat. We either didn't notice or didn't know to ask about the mangled ceiling tiles directly above Hargrove's desk.

Not to be confused with Woodward and Bernstein, we learned the next day when we arrived to find Chicago cops guarding the visiting clubhouse that someone (Jason Grimsley) had done some reconnaissance through the ceiling to retrieve Belle's corked bat.

Why did he replace it with a Paul Sorrento bat? Wasn't that an obvious tipoff to umps that someone had stolen the evidence?

Denser than most, I needed that explained to me.

"Think about it," an Indians official gently suggested when I asked him later. Oh, right. All of Belle's bats (at least on that trip) were corked.

My job here took me to cities and countries I might not otherwise have visited, but the connection and friendships are what I consider the greatest bonus from almost 27 years of sports writing in Cleveland.

This is my last column for cleveland.com and the last to appear in The Plain Dealer. Thank you for reading. Please follow me on Facebook and @budshaw on Twitter.

I'm not planning on leaving anytime soon. I grew up in Philly but Cleveland has long felt like home.

This was a great sports town long before the Cavaliers ended the title drought against Golden State. The summer before, the New York Times published its list of the Most Cursed Sports Cities in America. I must admit, it looked so much like my career road map I began to wonder if I might be part of the curse.

After all, I worked in three of the Top Four: here, Atlanta and San Diego.

Hard to believe it happened that way, since I felt so blessed at every stop. Nowhere more than here.

I had a ball.