CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Finally.

Improbably.

Unbelievably.

The fumble, the drive, the shot, the decision - especially the decision -- are finally put in their place, no longer entitled sponsors of Cleveland sports.

Instead we have The Redemption.

It's one size fits all title, as it should be after 52 years between parades. It's perfect for a team that trailed 3-1 in the NBA Finals, as well as for a city that last celebrated a championship when the Beatles came to America and when gas cost a quarter a gallon.

It especially fits LeBron James, who returned to Northeast Ohio with a Valentine in hand and made the city swoon for him all over again.

All the disappointments and gut punches over a half century - 145 combined seasons if you were masochistic enough to count them - are relegated to smaller print now that Cleveland is a once again a City of Champions.

The near misses aren't erased. They still hurt. But in terms only too familiar to Clevelanders we can think of them now as having diminished ills.

The curse is dead. Ding dong. Cavaliers 93, Warriors 89.

And thankfully the end of the streak means the end of those ESPN montages of Cleveland's sports futility, an interruption of those lists ranking Cleveland atop America's most cursed sports cities.

James came home to win a championship, to correct a mistake, to end a city's legacy of losing the big one (and lots of small ones, too). He did it in just his second season back. But it was two seasons that felt like 20 after the Cavs fell behind, 3-1, to a Golden State team that won a record 73 games and had climbed out of a grave to beat Oklahoma City.

The suspension of Draymond Green for Game 5 was a gift for sure, but not a guarantee of a Cavaliers' resurgence. They had to make the most of it. They lost six of seven playoff games to Golden State before roaring back and winning three straight - two on the Warriors' home floor.

LeBron Legend's back-to-back 41 point efforts in Game 5 and Game 6 set the course for Game 7 and raised doubt among what we thought was a worry-proof Warriors team. No NBA team had ever climbed out of a 3-1 hole in the NBA Finals and won a title. Fittingly, the Cavs decided to wrap even more history into the organization's first title.

When a championship finally came, it emerged from the longest odds imaginable. Not just from a 3-1 deficit, though that alone required the full arsenal of mountain climbing gear, but also from the empty hope left behind when James departed to Miami in 2010.

The Cavs were so far off the radar after that, the Indians giving away too much in financial wherewithal, the Browns too Brownsian to seriously imagine a championship anytime soon.

The Cavs run to the NBA Finals a year ago was sidetracked by such Cleveland moments - injuries to Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving - that fans had far more reason to hope than to truly believe. Now, a season later -- a season that brought a coaching change -- it ends this way:

With Kyrie Irving making magic and outplaying Steph Curry. With LeBron James turning in the third triple double in a NBA Finals Game 7. With people running our of their houses and into the streets near midnight on a Sunday.

With an answer to a simple question: What's a 52-year wait among friends and family?

In the most improbable way possible -- with the Cavs becoming the first team in NBA history to rally from 3-1 in the NBA Finals -- we can now call that wait something other than excruciating. We can call it over.

Finally.