To watch the Cavaliers’ brain trust explain Scott’s firing is to be entertained by sock puppets.

The children will be spared. It’s becoming harder to pass down that homegrown pain. Satellite dishes, streaming Internet — the young live vicariously in a world that technology creates, down the block but far from any sense of disloyalty or shame. They wear Yankees caps and Cowboys jerseys. That splayed-leg figure dunking on their hoodies isn’t Luke Witte. We grown-ups take victory, like work, wherever we find it. I, for one, sleep well in the knowledge that my car will never be overturned in a championship celebration.

Mojo or moxie: when the factories left, we lost more than a manufacturing base; we lost our strut. Which makes us not that different from you. Vexed by Washington gridlock or a stalled economy? Had the best-laid plans of wizards crash around your ears? It doesn’t matter where you were born: you are here. “Ich bin ein Clevelander.”

And yet.

The first pitch of spring slaps leather, the Indians hang around first place in May, and sports again becomes something beyond a balance sheet. A kickoff sails high into the autumn air, and for a moment, anything’s possible. This year will be different. And for a few hours, you hardly notice the days of your life piling up at your feet.

The local consensus regarding Haslam: wait and see. I hope he has a little of Veeck about him, or a good lawyer. Winning would fix everything. For some, any championship would be like the Rapture. I don’t shop that aisle. Oh, various talking heads will tote metaphorical lunch pails for a while, and the adjective “long-suffering” will be worn transparent. Then we will go back to work.

A truck yard on a spring night is the greatest place on earth. It’s the last few minutes of that lunch break, and the shop radio is pulling in the final inning of an Indians road game, the signal fading in and out, each pitch bouncing off the moon. We chew on Haslam’s woes for a while, then weigh in on whether a certain Heat player (not Cole) will ever return. The conversation drifts, as conversations will, to South Beach and to warm oceans, and to the fortune floating in said oceans.

My co-worker Ray trails dreadlocks, speaks fluent Bob Marley and always surprises. Ray is a cabbage wizard, and if there’s a rarer bird than a Rastafarian who cooks Bavarian, I haven’t found one. Ray read somewhere that whale vomit, or ambergris, is more precious than gold. He proposes to get a boat and fetch that treasure. Someday. What he lacks is a crew.

I sign on. As a Cleveland sports fan, I know I will not be busy during the playoffs. Any playoffs. As for that other Heat player — the one who took his talents to South Beach: he’ll be back. Terry the Driver’s adult daughter moved back home recently, a victim of a tough economy.

“They always come home,” Terry says.

And then we go back to work.