Where were you during the Red Right 88 game? That historic playoff game was, for this 12-year-old, my first introduction to life’s heartbreak.

The Browns started the 1980 season with two losses, but they earned the Kardiac Kids moniker with a series of spectacularly exciting late finishes, with QB Brian Sipe leading an offensive charge in an MVP season. The Browns won nine of their last 11 games, all but two by margins of six points or less. In Week 15 they lost to the Vikings on a Hail Mary catch by Ahmad Rashad, but the next week’s thrilling 27-24 win at Cincinnati earned them not only the division title, but also home field advantage throughout the playoffs.

It was also the third straight year that they had improved their overall record, the first time in team history they accomplished that. (The second time was in 2002.)

On January 4, 1981, my mom was hosting some bridal or baby shower, relegating Dad and me to a corner of the basement and an old black-and-white TV with rabbit ears. The picture was snowy, but at least we were warmer than those at the Stadium, where the wind chill off Lake Erie was -37.

The Browns’ prolific offense couldn’t find the end zone on this brutal winter day. It was the last game in the long career of Don Cockroft, team’s straight-on kicker/punter since I had been alive. He missed the extra point afer Ron Bolton’s interception return and lost the confidence of coach Sam Rutigliano. By mounting their best drive of the day, the Browns, trailing by just two, were deep into Oakland territory in the final minute. The famous play was Brian Sipe’s ill-fated pass toward Ozzie Newsome, who slipped and watched helplessly as Mike Davis’ interception ended the Browns’ miracle season.

I could try to describe how I felt, but the words would be no more vivid than the memory of any other Browns fan who shared that experience. Let’s just say that it set the stage for decades of disappointment, each one new in its particulars but cumulative in its frustrating effect.

Browns fans have seen promise and hope, and yet they’ve endured a long string of loss and betrayal, not always gracefully. The vicarious love we all felt for Sam and Sipe and Ozzie and the Pruitts has somehow changed with the passage of time. The sport, as with our society, is different — more corporate, more transactional, more conditional. The game has lost some of its artistic drama, now more of a platform for ads from every angle. The teams turn over so fast that the competition has changed in its very nature: less longstanding rivalry between teams and cities, more of a week-by-week evaluation of every player on a roster, compared with his salary and the other people who could easily be slotted into his place.

So as the Browns prepare for their first home game against the Oakland Raiders since that epic 1981 battle, I reflect on all that’s come to pass since then and wonder whether the real heartbreak is something even more fundamental than that missed play.

Odd, isn’t it, to feel such deep nostagia for so painful a memory?