The long-suffering sports city - which can't seem to win a trophy on a court or a field - captured one in a hotel ballroom Friday night when 14-year-old Anamika Veeramani took first prize at the 83rd Scripps National Spelling Bee.
"Go Cavs!" Anamika said, shortly after accepting the winner's trophy, which also comes with more than $40,000 in cash and prizes.
The Cavaliers lost their bid to win the NBA title this year, which allowed star center Shaquille O'Neal to drop by earlier in the day and film a segment for his reality show. Anamika, who lives in the Cleveland suburb of North Royalton, has never been to a game but is a big fan.
The eighth-grader also plays golf, likes to dance, and wants to go to Harvard and become a cardiovascular surgeon. She has the demeanor to pull it off: She stood deadpan with her hands behind her back after spelling the winning word, the medical term "stromuhr" - a blood-flow gauge - and didn't crack a smile until the trophy was presented.
"It was too surreal," she said. "It was an amazing experience. I usually have a poker face, so that's what that was."
Anamika, who tied for fifth in 2009, became the third straight Indian-American champion, and the eighth in the last 12 years. The run began when Nupur Lala won in 1999 and was featured in the documentary "Spellbound."
But she broke a long Ohio drought, becoming the first bee winner from the state since 1964. Her parents have promised her a cell phone for winning "and basically anything I want."
There was a three-way tie for second among the 273 spellers who started the three-day competition Wednesday. Adrian Gunawan, 14, of Arlington Heights, Ill.; Elizabeth Platz, 13, of Shelbina, Mo.; and Shantanu Srivatsa, 13, of West Fargo, N.D., were all eliminated in the same round.
Anamika survived the round by spelling "juvia" - a Brazil nut - and then had to sit through a tense 3 1/2-minute commercial before spelling the championship word.
"It was just really nerve-racking," Anamika said. "The commercial breaks didn't really help."
There was also plenty of drama before the finals, thanks to an unpopular move that had some spellers and the parents claiming the bee was unfair and had kowtowed too much to television.
Concerned that there wouldn't be enough spellers left to fill the two-hour slot on ABC, organizers stopped the semifinals in the middle of a round early Friday afternoon - and declared that the 10 spellers onstage would advance to the prime-time broadcast, including six who didn't have to spell a word in the interrupted round.
Essentially, the alphabetical order of the U.S. states helped determined which spellers got to move on the marquee event.
"I would rather have five finalists than five who didn't deserve it," said Elizabeth, the finalist from Missouri and one of the four spellers who spelled a word correctly before the round was stopped. "I think it was unfair."
It's one of the pitfalls of the growing popularity of the bee, which has to yield to the constraints of its TV partners. There were 19 spellers at the start of the round, which was too many for prime-time. But when the round turned out to be brutal - nine of the first 13 misspelled - ABC was on the verge of having too few.
"I don't feel bad at all for giving these children the opportunity," bee director Paige Kimble said. "Do I wish we could give it to 19? Yes, certainly, but that's not practical in a two-hour broadcast window. We know it's unpopular and we don't like to do it, but sometimes you can get into a position where that's exactly what you have to do."
