The season-opening loss in Philly added to the Browns’ long cascade of calamity. But the Week 2 opponent reminds us of the worst twist of the dagger ever to strike the hearts of Cleveland football fans.

The very existence of the Baltimore Ravens derives from supreme treachery. We should never, ever forget that fact. The damage wrought by Art Modell in The Move was so much more than a vile violation of trust or a selfish assault on Browns fandom, though it was both of those.

Modell’s machinations ripped a playoff-caliber Browns team out of the city that had followed, favored, and funded it through thick and thin for half a century. Outrage doesn’t begin to describe what promptly followed, and the departing owner was ultimately forced against his original wishes to rebrand his uprooted team. The league then figured out how best to capitalize on its promise to get the Browns back in Cleveland.

Browns football was dead for three years. What rose in 1999, wearing our beloved brown and orange, owned by Modell’s erstwhile ally?

A zombie.

I don’t come to that term frivolously. But how else can you characterize the stricken spirit of Browns fandom reanimated around a team known as pro football’s worst for close to two decades now? It’s not quite alive, not how it was. The trappings are still somewhat familiar, but really, the “new” Browns fall into the category of the undead.

With all due respect to Joe Thomas, Phil Dawson, Josh Cribbs and others who have poured their professional lives admirably into this reborn team, the big picture view is dim. Zombies. Much as we might wish it were otherwise, as much psychic energy as we’ve invested in them, until Hue (or some successor) breaks through and the Browns finally hoist that Lombardi Trophy, that’s really what the Cleveland Browns of the 21st century most resemble.

Zombies.

Every interface with the Baltimore Ravens is steeped in this reality. Browns fans have unique rivalries with each other team in their division. The Pittsburgh Steelers are the obnoxious bullies in black, by far Cleveland’s closest and most frequent opponent. The Cincinnati Bengals are the cross-state copycats, created by our exiled namesake, sporting those oh-so-similar colors and a perpetual grudge against our gritty city.

But the Ravens, wrought from the wreckage of our heartfelt hopes, are in their own category. Their every success heaps more indignity onto the Browns, as if the ends justify the means, no matter what our parents brought us up to believe. The fans in Baltimore, having lost their Colts in another disgraceful move only a dozen years prior, now back the product of an epic betrayal without a shred of shame.

How apt it is that the death of the original Browns, and the psychic need to preserve their cultural legacy in Cleveland, led to a new outfit named for a poem in which the title character represents a ceaseless, tormenting reminder of loss.

If it’s been a while, I strongly encourage you to read that poem this very minute, and to read it as all poems should be read: out loud. Reconnect with beauty and with what Poe considered to be its purest expression, sadness. Yes, sadness, a term entirely familiar in its application to modern Browns fandom, made possible only through the depth of the love for what we had. And it is gone but for these myriad ironic reminders.

More cascading indignity. More upheaval. More epithets etched into the identity of what was once the greatest organization and most successful dynasty pro football had ever known. And more to come…

… unless there is balm in Gilead. And the Browns don’t get suspended for using it.