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The Optimist - March 18, 2016

Shalom, sons and daughters of the Cuyahoga! Don’t be alarmed. It’s just your friendly neighborhood Optimist – checking in from shimmering Central Florida.

Friends, like the passing of Halley’s Comet, sometimes there is a confluence of events that simply begs us to join as one.

That event occurred this week, when – according the Optimist Calendar – the first day of March Madness® and St. Patrick’s Day went down on the exact same day, marking the official beginning of Spring!

(For those of you unfamiliar with the Optimist Calendar: We just marked the first day of Spring this week. Summer starts, easily enough, on Memorial Day. Fall begins the minute Jerry Lewis finishes singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. And New Year’s Day is the Monday after the Super Bowl. I hope you’re still keeping up with your resolutions. I’ve stuck to mine religiously: To keep doing all the great things I've been doing the previous year that's kept me so awesome.)

Now, some of you might be thinking: ‘Hey Optimist, why are you crowing about St. Patrick’s Day on the day after?! We’re already hungover!’

I’ll tell you why. It’s on accounta this is a big weekend of Cavaliers basketball. Bigger than many of you may realize.

I’ll explain the “big picture” before we wrap up today. But this weekend could be the impetus behind the Wine and Gold’s final flurry heading into the postseason.

Maybe you’re thinking tonight’s matchup in Orlando will be a total cakewalk in which we’ll be greeted as liberators; that – after rattling off 13 consecutive wins – TheBron could beat up the Magic with Kevin Love tied behind his back.

Well it’s just not that easy, people.

The Cavaliers still have to play four quarters of solid basketball against a Scott Skiles-coached squad if they hope to take the momentum of two straight wins into Saturday’s huge showdown in Miami.

And as good as the Wine and Gold have been against the Magic (in any arena) over the past three years is as bad as they’ve been in Miami over the past five. The Cavaliers’ last victory on South Beach came on January 25, 2010. Cleveland’s starting lineup was Shaq, J.J. Hickson, Daniel Gibson, Anthony Parker and TheBron.

And if you knuckaheads don’t get the feeling the Cavaliers are going to eventually meet the Heat in this year’s postseason, you’re getting a different vibe than I. If Numeral 23 is going to bring the Holy Grail to Cleveland, it only seems natural that the Basketball Gods are gonna make him go through Miami to get it.

Personally, I’d love to talk X’s and O’s about how Coach Tyronn Lue and his staff plan to vanquish both Florida foes all night. But as you know, if the column doesn’t have any educational or historical value, angular PR jedi Jeff “Schaef” Schaefer throws quite the tantrum. (I don’t know why I care about his opinion; the kid’s never had a glass of milk in his life!)

So here it goes.

We have to go way, way back for today’s Today in History. All the way back to 37. Not 1937. Thirty-seven.

That’s when the Roman Senate annulled Tiberius’ will and appointed Caligula as the new Emperor. And what a party that turned out to be!

Caligula did everything big right from the start. Within the first three months of his reign, over 160,000 animals were sacrificed. He immediately turned the palace into a brothel and started dressing in public as various gods, like the mighty Hercules. Pretty soon, he’d gone way off the deep end: making senators jog alongside his chariot, ordering the erection of a statue of himself in Jerusalem, appointing his horse a priest, showing up in disguise in Alexandria as “Billy Caligula” and asking centurions to turn over their plundered booty to the state.

Well, a famous horndog like Caligula should have known that there’s no way that centurions are gonna give up they plundered booty! So one of them – named Cassius Chaerea (who Caligula would make fun of for having ‘girl-voice’) – stabbed his arse dead. His horse wasn’t even around to give him last rites.

Today’s Birthdays include high-rollers like novelist John Updike as well as Grover Cleveland, Peter Graves, country star Charley Pride, Mike Webster, super fox Vanessa Williams, Alice in Chains lead man Jerry Cantrell, multi-talented Queen Latifa, singer-songwriter Lykee Li, Maroon 5 singer Adam Levin and former victory cigar, Brian Scalabrine – who Sixers fans confused Cavs play-by-play man, John Michael, with as he got on the Team Bus in Philly.

Dead on This Day and, to my knowledge, Still Dead are actress Natasha Richardson, Bernard Malamud (who, among other novels wrote “The Natural”), Charley Lau (who taught Roy Hobbs to hit) and Johnny Appleseed, who, embarrassingly, I half-thought was a folklore character, like Paul Bunyan. Either way, he’s gone now.

If he was still around, a guy like Johnny Appleseed, who apparently did so much of his work in Ohio, would know that the Wine and Gold around about ready to hit their stride down the stretch.

I’m not in the predicting business no more. But if I were, I’d be labeling these next two games: “Win-Out Weekend.” And by that I mean that starting this weekend, I feel the Wine and Gold are going to run the table the rest of the way. (I was gonna go with a big “W.O.W.” campaign, but I see bumper stickers of that acronym all time I have to assume it means the same thing.)

But if you’re asking me if I honestly believe that the Cavaliers can score consecutive wins over the Magic, Heat, Nuggets, Bucks, Nets, Knicks, Rockets, Nets again, Hawks, Hornets, Bucks at their place, Pacers, Bulls, Hawks at home and Pistons on FanApp night when the players give you the shirts off their backs and shoes off their feet? The answer is yes.

Yes I do.

But if they do happen to drop one or two along the way I won’t be mad. I just know that games like last week’s loss to shorthanded Utah and that shart-show two weeks ago against Memphis are things of the past.

So anyone who wants to take sides against Cleveland better line up opposite of the Optimist. And that goes double for Siri.

Siri can shove it!

I know she’s talking about our misguided little pumpkinhead cousins on the Lake. But I say: We’re all Clevelanders. And a joke against one of us is a joke against all of us.

I was birthed and raised in what I like to call “the Cleveland of Cleveland” – Garfield Heights, Ohio (I’m using the actual name because I’m swelling with pride.) And on Friday night, my beloved Bulldogs try to get one step closer to a state title when they take on the snobs of Westerville South in Columbus.

Last week, the Bulldogs beat St. Ignatius in double-OT in a game that featured five buzzer-beaters. If that’s not fate calling, I don’t know what is.

I know many of you don’t give a crap about high school sports, and normally I don’t either. But what kind of homey would I be if I didn’t wish Coach Sonny Johnson and my Dawgs well?!

I’ll speak with you guys later but I’ll need your energy tonight.

I'll be back whenever. I'm a lone wolf and I don't play by your stupid rules.

The only rule I live by – besides the George Carlin edict about never driving behind an old man in a hat – is the rule that keeps me, as a double-Clevelander, moderately sane. And that is to …

Keep the faith, Garfield Heights

Your pal,

The Optimist