So much for something different

Sigh.

What can anyone say to possibly sum up what all Bengals fans are feeling right now?

Nothing.

Cincinnati lost to the Houston Texans to make the Bengals' trip to the playoffs about as long as a Brittney Spears marriage. Again. The play calling was awful, Andy Dalton almost made me miss Carson Palmer and the highly touted defensive line never got near Matt Schaub.

It even had the hallmark of a classic Bengals loss: Fans were given legitimate hope at the very end.

And then, with one overthrown TD pass, it was all taken away.

Cue the fire and brimstone. Cue the calls for the heads of Dalton, Marvin Lewis, Jay Gruden and everyone else who may have contributed to a loss that ended Cincinnati's season the same way it did last year. And in 2009. And in 2005.

In some respects, these calls are justified. Going by Einstein's definition of insanity, change must be made. But maybe in a few weeks cooler heads will prevail and Cincinnati's esteemed owner Mike Brown will bring back the entire cast of characters who raised the Bengals to the highest level of play they've been in years.

But what if that's not enough?

What if this cast of characters has hit its ceiling?

We've seen what this crew can do. And to be honest, it's not much better than what we saw from the Dick LeBeau/Gus Frerotte-esque combinations of the '90s and '00s.

I'm not going to pretend I know what the real answer is. Whether it's getting rid of Gruden, Lewis, Dalton or some combination of the three. But I do know another slightly above average season will no longer cut it in Cincinnati.

The bar has been raised. More is expected out of the Bengals than before. Unfortunately for Cincinnati fans, we have an entire offseason to think about exactly what those expectations are.

The Hope of a City

It’s been a rough couple decades to be a Cincinnati sports fan.

Ever since the Reds won the World Series in 1990, championship banners haven’t exactly been a main export of the Queen City. Cincy fans have been subjected to some very bad professional sports teams and even more painfully mediocre ones. These teams have put fans through year after hopeful year of disappointing torment.

And we sat through every game.

All 214 Bengals losses from 1991 through 2011, and each of the Reds’ 1,704 defeats in that span.

Even worse, Cincinnati’s only two professional franchises (I shudder to think what we’d do with an NBA team) managed to win a total of three playoff games in those 42 combined seasons. And all of those victories were in one divisional series the Reds played in ’95. The Bengals assembled three trips of their own to the postseason, all after 2000; all resulted in convincing losses.

We’ve endured all of it.

Sure, we said we were done countless times. I can’t even tell you how often I swore off my allegiance to Cincinnati sports after an inexplicably bad defensive effort by the Bengals or a three-homerun losing effort by the Reds. But just like everyone else, the next day I took the paper bag off my head and somehow truly believed the next game, the next week; the next season would be different.

But year after year, we were met with the same results. The 7-9s; the 78-84s. And those were the good years. Those were the years when we were at least teased and taunted with that dangerous hope of changing winds. Other years, the dark ones, were the 3-13 or 66-93 efforts. The years when we heard of owners who cared more about money than winning and locker room atmospheres that can only be described as poisonous.

Cincinnati’s athletic woes didn’t even end at the professional level. The University of Cincinnati’s hoops team is better remembered for a brawl than its recent basketball success. And the Bearcat’s football team is going through its third painful breakup in less than a decade with a third coach who saw the program as a stepping stone instead of a legitimate contender.

Hope was the only thing that got us through these teams and those times. Hope made us keep watching. Hope told us better days were ahead.

Days, maybe, like this Saturday.

The Cincinnati Bengals are in the postseason for the third time in four years, marking the first back-to-back playoff seasons this franchise has seen in three decades. This year hasn’t always been pretty, but it was highlighted by a 13-10 late-season victory at rival Pittsburgh that knocked the Steelers out of the playoffs and clinched a Bengals berth. Even an ugly win like that is sweeter than anything Cincinnati fans have tasted in a long time.

But now it’s time to take that all-important next step. The reach from mediocre to something more, whatever that is. Sure, it’s nice to move past the .500 seasons of old, but how much difference does it really make if all the farther we get to see is a couple regular season wins and a painful playoff loss?

If that’s the only thing I have to look forward to this week, I’d almost rather not even bother.

Cincinnati fans are tough. We’ve made it through the abyss of athletics with precious little to show for it. But we still have the teams. Unlike the fans from some other professional sports settings, we’ve kept our teams when they were better for a punch line than a sports venue. The Bengals are no exception. Once the laughingstock of the league with more arrests and failed draft picks on a yearly basis than wins, the orange and black have a chance to change the direction of a sports town that’s been going south far too long.

While the first Bengals playoff victory in my lifetime wouldn’t erase the past by a long shot, it would go a long way to starting a new chapter in Cincinnati sports history. I don’t know how many postseason wins it will take for the Reds, Bengals and Bearcats to make the last 20 years of frustration worth it, but I do know it has to start this Saturday versus the Texans.