Browns fans expressed their anger over the team's move by literally tearing Cleveland Stadium apart during the last game of 1995. Stephen Dunn/Getty Images

"By Friday night before the Houston game it was out, and by Saturday it was confirmed somehow,'' Belichick recalled. "By Saturday morning, the whole city was in a complete panic, as were the players and everybody in the organization. Everybody was calling, saying, 'What's going to happen? What do we do?'

"The only deal was whether the team was going to stay in Cleveland and play the '96 season there as a lame duck, or move to Baltimore right away. No one knew anything, and Art never really provided one ounce of support for all those people working for him, and still wearing the Browns colors.''

Belichick implored Modell to address the team and the organization, offering something in the way of a definitive timetable for the move, and who would be asked to go with the team to Baltimore. But other than a brief, cursory pep talk to the team on the Wednesday following the relocation announcement, Modell said little and clarified even less. Modell at that point left the city for his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., making quick trips to Baltimore as well, and never again that year returned to Cleveland. He barely kept in contact with the team's front office.

"In this business, we all get fired, we all change jobs, and there's a lot of uncertainty,'' said Scott Pioli, the Patriots vice president/player personnel, who was a 30-year old Browns personnel assistant in '95. "But hearing that the entire franchise was moving, trying to wrap your hands around the concept was difficult.

"Things got so out of control so fast. All hours of the day there were fans picketing outside our building. There were death threats being made to people, even beyond Art Modell. There were cop cars and constant surveillance around the building. It was just surreal. So far beyond the norm that no one knew how to deal with it.''

The public's antipathy for all things Browns-related after the news broke created a bunker-like mentality within the team complex in suburban Berea. Local sponsors withdrew their support almost unilaterally, and the atmosphere within the community grew so charged that the team couldn't even get its junk food delivered.

Recalls Michael Lombardi, who was then the Browns director of player personnel and is now the Oakland Raiders' top personnel executive: "We couldn't even get the Eagle Snack guy or the Coke guy to deliver any more. Everybody was so anti-Cleveland Browns.

"That first week, Nov. 10 was the anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (on Lake Superior), and the joke was, that's what this is like. That (Gordon Lightfoot) song, when he sings, 'Fellas, it's too rough to feed you. Fellas, it's been good to know you.' We all felt like a band of brothers, actually. That we were able to survive it at all. We all have a bond among us after going through that together. Because we all knew that some of us were going to Baltimore, and some of us weren't. We knew some of us were going to take the blame for losing.''