By 1974, the Cleveland Arena was living on borrowed time.

Its owner was Nick Mileti, who also owned Cleveland’s baseball Indians, basketball Cavaliers and hockey Barons. Mileti had just built the 20,000-seat Coliseum at Richfield, which was about to open to rave reviews.

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So 2012 has come and gone without another championship from any of Cleveland’s teams.

While there were no titles to celebrate, there were still plenty of stories, from firings to trades, to too many losses and too few wins.

Let's take a look at the year in Cleveland sports, starting with the first quarter of the year.

The Cleveland Browns opened the new year in predictable fashion, dropping the season’s final game against Pittsburgh by a score of 13-9. While it wasn’t as bad as the previous year, when the Browns lost 41-9 to the Steelers, the loss ended Pat Shurmur’s first year as coach with a 4-12 record.

The end of the season also led the Browns to continue their decade-long quest to find a quarterback. In an NFL that has turned into a passing man’s game, Colt McCoy and Seneca Wallace were no longer going to cut it. Coach Pat Shurmur also finally realized that having an offensive coordinator on the staff is kind of important.

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Well, it's official. The Browns are under new management, from the owner all the way down to the head coach and, probably, most of the assistant coaches. What an unpredictable year in Cleveland professional sports this has been!

Nonetheless, we'll attempt here to foresee another 12 months into 2013 by discussing possible answers to the relevant questions of the day. So let’s don our trusty "Carnac the Magnificent" turban and take a look inside the envelopes:

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2012 ends on Tuesday, and as the world didn’t last week, I guess I now have to recap what the hell exactly happened. I could sum it up with “that sucked”, but that would be too simple. So let’s look in detail at a month-by-month recap of those things which impacted our lives in 2012.

January

January started off well enough with Cleveland’s second favorite team (“whoever is playing the Steelers”) winning their opening round playoff game. Tim Tebow, Denver’s starting quarterback, throws a long touchdown pass in overtime to win the game. That actually happened. In retrospect not betting my children’s college funds on the Broncos to win the Super Bowl the moment they replaced Tebow with Peyton Manning is a mistake I’ll long regret. The very next day, Alabama wins their second national championship in three years, and is about to win their third in four years in a couple of weeks. Yeah folks, Nick Saban is leaving that sweet honeypot to coach the Browns. Joe Paterno assumes room temperature later in the month, the extent of what a douche he was yet unknown at the time, but I’m sure he’s frying nicely in that special place in hell in which people who put their own self-interests above the basic human welfare of children reside. Grady Sizemore, meanwhile, blows out a knee walking his dog, which is curious because he doesn’t have a dog.

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