The Cleveland Browns Hall of Fame receiver Dante Lavelli, right, known as Gluefingers, in a 1951 game against the Eagles.

Sports are precise; straight as foul lines or finish lines, each basepath measured exactly, every game interval spaced evenly as chalk lines on the gridiron. There are clocks and timekeepers, and rule books and officials ready to enforce them.

Fanhood is not a straight line. It has broken-field moves. It is a great, winding thing, fanhood is, played on the fly, and if you can follow it in Cleveland — home of the Browns and the Crooked River and unceasing heartbreak — through its many twists and turns, then you can follow it anywhere. Even to the hereafter.

I do not know if an obituary can go viral, but the one for the late Scott E. Entsminger, of Mansfield, Ohio, comes close. “A lifelong Cleveland Browns fan and season ticket holder,” said the notice of his July 4 passing in The Columbus Dispatch, “he also wrote a song each year and sent it to the Cleveland Browns as well as offering other advice on how to run the team. He respectfully requests six Cleveland Browns pallbearers so the Browns can let him down one last time.” And just like that, Entsminger’s parting shot became another chapter in the big book of Cleveland unrequited love.

Mine is a story about requited love. It is a story of small Ohio towns and panzer units. The story wanders in the Ardennes forest before coming to rest on a sofa in American suburbia, and in between there are blacksmiths and trees, lots of trees, and snow. Otto Graham and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt make cameos. It ends with an obituary. But it begins at the dinner table.

Sunday dinners with my grandmother Gemma Colino meant roasts and pasta and sheet pizzas as wide as a church window. I grew up in the Jim Brown ’60s, but knew all about the glory days of the 1950s Browns. My aunts’ favorite player was Dante Lavelli. I knew from listening that Dante came from Hudson, Ohio, to gallop across the All-America Football Conference and the N.F.L., twisting and turning and frustrating defensive backs for a decade. I knew that in a sport of Crazylegs and Galloping Ghosts he was Gluefingers Lavelli because of his sure hands. I half-expected him to show up when my grandmother made braciola. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1975.

A lifetime later I was working a night job I hated — don’t ask how I got there — making my way through the suburban traffic. “Lavelli’s” read the sign on a furniture store, and because I am a fearless individual it took years for me to gather the pluck to enter that showroom. “You looking for Dan?” the man at the door asked, and there he was, a little grayer but still a block of granite. Dante tried to sell me a settee, then offered me a seat on a sofa to talk football.

He told me his father was a blacksmith who made horseshoes and then moved on to ornamental wrought iron when tractors came in. Dante went to Ohio State to play for Paul Brown, but life began one of its scrambles. World War II was raging, so he and another Buckeye named Lou Groza enlisted, intending to serve together. Groza wound up in the Pacific; Dante splashed ashore at Normandy a week after D-Day. “Someone asked an officer what our orders were, and he pointed and said: ‘Berlin’s that way. Start walking,’ ” Dante told me with a grin.

Christmas 1944 found him in a town called St. Vith, the German artillery pounding the Belgian woods to splinters around him. This was the Nazi counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge, and hell seemed to freeze over. Christmas 1946 found Dante catching the winning touchdown from Graham to beat the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium. Improbable bookends, I told him, but Dante just shrugged. Life turns and sprints away, and what could you do but follow?

I told him I was a little wary of the shiny new Browns Stadium, maybe because it was celebrated so wildly that it got turned into sacred ground long before much grass got trampled. There was something merrily decrepit about the old Municipal Stadium where those great Browns teams played, all rivets and rust, not least because it fit so perfectly into the iron city around it. Dante, who knew more about iron than I ever would, pointed out the industrial washing machines. “Really nice,” Dante said. Things change, he said, then asked how come you couldn’t find a suitable plate of spaghetti and meatballs in this town.

Over three years we shared a half-dozen encounters. The last time we spoke, by phone, Dante was nursing a broken leg; he had slipped on the winter ice outside his store.

There was a stack of interview requests on his desk and wonder in his voice: he had become more known to historians and reunion organizers for surviving the Battle of the Bulge than for any of his football accomplishments.

Each evening on the way to work I passed the carmine-colored Cadillac with the “Mr. Glue” plates, and all was right with the world. Then, one day in 2009, his car was gone.

I’m glad I got to meet Dante but sad that I never made Scott Entsminger’s acquaintance.

The newspapers mentioned that Entsminger had retired after 32 years at General Motors — we are both time-clock punchers and would have had that much as a start. We would have music. According to his obituary, Entsminger played guitar as I once did — or better, hopefully (my own musical career began with a half-hour rendition of “Louie, Louie” at Cleveland’s Franklin Street Y one teenage night, and pretty much ended right there, too.) And eventually we would get around to the 350-pound lineman in the room. “How you think the Browns will do?” one of us would ask, and throats would be cleared.

Scott Entsminger was laid to rest on a hot July morning. The Browns did not dispatch any pallbearers — not even a punter — but they did spring for a team jersey. You embrace fandom as a blessing or you bear it as a burden. But first you have to catch it. Even if it takes until the hereafter.

You have a good owner.

As they discussed on ESPN- probably not. You do it for one guy, you'd almost have to for everyone who made a similar request.

I love this guy, excellent last request. I wonder if the browns will honour it? Either way, the world is a poorer place without someone like him.

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A lifelong Cleveland Browns fan has gone to his final rest, but not before making one last request from the team.

Scott E. Entsminger, 55, of Mansfield, Ohio, died on July 4. Entsminger, a Columbus native, was a musician and a Browns season-ticket holder who wrote a song for the team each year and sent it in, along with his advice on how to run the team.

According to his obituary in the Columbus Dispatch, Entsminger also "respectfully requests six Cleveland Browns pall bearers so the Browns can let him down one last time."

The family also has requested that "everyone" wear their Browns clothing to Entsminger's funeral Tuesday.

No word from the team on that request for pallbearers.