My dad was from Columbus, Ohio, but he arrived in Cleveland when he was 25 and remained an unshakable, long-suffering fan of its sports teams to his dying day. It wasn’t easy. I left Ohio when I was 25, but retain great affection for the place, though I have long since despaired of its hapless franchises.

The last World Series win for the Indians was in 1948. The last football championship was in 1964, before there even was a Super Bowl. When the hated Art Modell moved the team to Baltimore, my usually mild father experienced a mixture of rage and sorrow.

But now LeBron has brought a trophy to a city that has lost a lot over the years. Once an industrial powerhouse and the sixth largest city in the country, Cleveland now ranks 31st, after Kansas City and Las Vegas. It once was home to John D. Rockefeller and dozens of Fortune 500 headquarters, and now it isn’t.

If ever a city needed a win, it was Cleveland. Admittedly a sports victory doesn’t change the underlying structural issues that afflict a Rust Belt dinosaur, but a little reflected glory sure can give place a lift. I wish I were there for the celebrating, especially since it isn’t snowing. There are four or five months when you don’t want to be in northern Ohio, but summer and fall are glorious. And this is clearly the summer of Cleveland’s contentment, after decades of discontent.

At this stage in the history of the world, it isn’t’ fashionable to subscribe to the great man theory. All sorts of complicated technological, religious, sociological, economic and even climate factors are felt to account for everything from the Fall of Rome to the triumph of capitalism. Engineers tend to pooh-pooh the indispensability of genius. When it’s time to railroad, they say, somebody will railroad. The big sports are team sports. And yet.

Would the years 1795-1815 have looked the same if Napoleon’s horse had stumbled and killed him when he was a little corporal? What if Hitler had gotten into art school, or Hamilton had died of the same fever that killed his mother, or polio had killed FDR?

There sure wouldn’t have been glory days in Cleveland if Jim Brown had stuck with basketball, track or lacrosse, at all of which he also excelled in college., or if LeBron hadn’t felt he had unfinished business at home and had decided to stay in Florida. The 1964 victory is inconceivable without Jim Brown, still arguably the greatest football player ever. And with this astonishing come-from-behind series, LeBron gets a higher pedestal than he had before. There’s a reason a few guys get called sports heroes.

Legends aren’t just made of talent and opportunity, however, but also require an audience hungry for a legendary exploit to cheer for, weep at, swoon over, remember and recount for years, inspiring new generations to believe in the home town – whether it’s Athens, Florence or Cleveland.

Miracles are sometimes the intersection of a man and a shared need, dream, or delusion. Apparently the Cavaliers’ coach, en route to Oakland, said that if anybody didn’t believe they were going to win they should get off the plane. Nobody put on their parachutes and bailed. And so the win is likely to persuade Clevelanders to hang in there a little long, and believe in comebacks despite all the reasons not to do so..