Shades for the bright season to be

Buffalo Wild Wings, which started in Columbus, hopes their week-by-week Browns coloring book is a nice draw.

Fewer than 50 hours ’til kickoff into a rollicking stadium of our own fall colors.

The essential energies of autumn and winter vibrate with brown, orange, and white.

Brown, rooted earth, fixing trees that reveal more branches as each wind blows. We get that here. This year there’s such a rush for the Browns, such solid support of their ascendance. Brown dominates: the early history, now into the team’s exceptional 2019 primary colors. As they don the helmet stripes Sunday, may they dominate in the direction they’re pointing.

Orange emerges too, in the growing gourds and the drying, dying leaves. The past must fall and be renewed into that earth. This cycle we may indeed harvest wins bigger even than the size of our heady hopes.

And white, plain white, snow white, pure as a fresh start. As fate stirs in the air, and Lake Erie’s vapors linger aloft, let our figurative fortunes reflect more billowing white in those clouds than anything ghastly or dark.

Granted, all this might seem highfalutin to the newest vintage of Browns fans. Right over the kids’ heads perhaps. But at the stadium Sunday, in millions of homes, and many more gathering spots throughout The Land and beyond, the Browns will get the attention.

Browns hype is vivid, from the SI cover, to Myles Garrett‘s fine psych-up piece, to the Vegas odds, to the pages of The Atlantic! How far we’ve come from the coloring book published five years ago, “Why is Daddy Sad on Sunday?”

The 2019 version of that, pictured above, lets kids color this Browns season their way, with pages for each of the Browns’ weekly match-ups. You’ll find them now at several northeast Ohio B-dubs:

  • 949 N. Lexington-Springmill Road Ontario, OH (Richland County)
  • 4122 Burbank Road Wooster, OH (Wayne County)
  • 1830 East Main Street Ashland, OH (Ashland County)
  • 8465 Pearl Road Strongsville, OH (Cuyahoga County)
  • 5050 Eastpointe Drive Medina, OH (Medina County)
  • 18865 Giles Road Aurora, OH (Portage County).

For the kids, all the fans, and the Browns themselves, enjoy taking part in the emerging spectacle between the lines. And may all of whatever happens outside those lines only serve to bring us together to share in this fall’s glories.