Final Results

Attraction Percent Pro Football Hall of Fame, Canton 27.9% Cedar Point, Sandusky 22.5% Lake Erie Islands (Put-in-Bay, Kelleys, Middle Bass) 13.3% Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Cleveland 10.6% Hocking Hills State Park (including Old Man's Cave) 8.5% Columbus Zoo and Aquarium 4.7% National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Dayton 3.9% Mohican State Park 3.6% Kings Island, Mason 2.51% Salt Fork State Park 2.47%

CLEVELAND, Ohio - In the end, the world's best steel roller coaster was no match for the men in gold jackets.

In a dramatic, fourth-quarter win over Cedar Point, Canton's Pro Football Hall of Fame was voted Ohio's top tourist attraction in an online reader contest sponsored by The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.

But the football hall had to call in some star-studded reinforcements to take the lead:

* On Wednesday, the last day of voting, several NFL football teams - including the Washington Redskins, Jacksonville Jaguars and Seattle Seahawks -- used their Twitter accounts to encourage fans to vote for the football hall.

* Former players Emmitt Smith and Thurman Thomas, both of whom possess the coveted gold jacket awarded Hall of Fame inductees, also used Twitter to campaign for Canton.

* Even the rock band Aerosmith - headlining the Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Festival in Canton in August - gave a shout out to the hall (perhaps, too, generating some ticket sales for the upcoming show), messaging its million-plus followers on Twitter: "Vote for the best tourist destination in Ohio, the PFHOF, home to Aerosmith Concert for Legends Friday August 7th."

The Seattle Seahawks campaigned for the Pro Football Hall of Fame with this Tweet, featuring hall of famers Steve Largent, Walter Jones and Cortez Kennedy.

And a successful campaign it was. According to the final tally, the football hall received 27.9 percent of all votes cast.

Cedar Point -- the Sandusky amusement park generally considered one of the best in the world, and home to Millennium Force, a gargantuan steel coaster that consistently is named tops in the industry -- finished in second, after holding the lead through the first seven days of voting. The park received 22.5 percent of all votes cast.

Finishing in third, fourth and fifth places: the Lake Erie Islands, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Hocking Hills State Park.

Rounding out the top 10: the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Mohican State Park, Kings Island and Salt Fork State Park.

That's not a bad to-do list as we head into the summer travel season.

The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com launched the contest 21/2 weeks ago, as a way to boost interest in Ohio's many and varied tourist destinations. We started with a list of 60 sights - organized into five geographic regions - which voters then culled to 10 finalists.

For the past nine days, online readers filled out nearly 15,000 ballots, registering their first-, second- and third-place choices (one vote per day per IP address was allowed).

The football hall received 4,627 first-place votes, compared to 2,813 for Cedar Point and 1,305 for the Lake Erie Islands.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame has been a tourist draw since it opened in 1963, not far from the downtown Canton car dealership where the National Football League was conceived. Initially 19,000 square feet, the hall has grown over the years to more than five times its original size (and a proposal to create an entertainment-focused Hall of Fame Village in the neighborhood surrounding the museum is in the planning stages).

In 2013, the football hall attracted 208,000 visitors, drawn by the museum's vast collection of memorabilia, interactive exhibits - and the bronze busts of 287 football greats, the best who ever played the game.

But is the football hall really the top tourist spot in Ohio?

The results aren't intended to be a scientific judgment of what's most popular (in that case, we would have hired a professional pollster or just compared annual attendance figures and dispensed with the contest entirely).

They may, however, be a good gauge of fan passion.

Are rabid pro football fans really more passionate than Cedar Point's crazy coaster fans? For nine days in early May, they were.

There are, alas, no prizes for the winners, other than bragging rights.

Perhaps the biggest prize belongs to Ohio travelers, who, we hope, are a bit more enlightened by the state's many offerings.

Never been to the Pro Football Hall of Fame? Perhaps this is the year.

Emmitt Smith, the former Dallas Cowboys running back and 2010 hall of fame inductee, highly recommends it.

Editor's note: As part of the contest, we published profiles of all 10 finalists. Find them here: Cedar Point, the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Hocking Hills State Park, Kings Island, Lake Erie Islands, Mohican State Park, National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Salt Fork State Park and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.