THEY START GATHERING four hours before the gates open. It's a muggy Friday morning in late July, with thunder forecast for the afternoon, but the fans lining up outside the back entrance to the Cleveland Browns' training facility in Berea, Ohio, will not be deterred. They're here, on a leafy suburban street six weeks before the regular season, for the Browns' first public day of training camp, which is free each year.

It's an eclectic procession waiting to enter -- some large and serious men wearing jowly rubber dog masks, families in matching orange football helmets, elderly couples with tributes to Paul Brown etched on their forearms like initials carved in wood -- yet in their sense of affiliation and purpose, they're perfectly, intimidatingly aligned.

"You got a knife?" a man named

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