The return of baseball to Brooklyn Monday received much notice -- lots of written words, video tape and a few quick-Martha-here-comes-a-camera-crew tears.

	The Cyclones debuted in KeySpan Park in front of a sell-out crowd.

It was enough to, well, to remind us that some people need a good knee to the stomach. Just on G.P.

The Brooklyn Cyclones played their first home game Monday night in a $39 million ballpark at Coney Island to appropriate fanfare ... appropriate, that is, for those who still understand that the nostalgia industry is run by an evil cabal of media-connected septuagenarians from New York and Boston.

We understand this, because we never could get much response to the question, "If returning baseball to Brooklyn is so important, why isn't someone resuscitating the St. Louis Browns?"

You see, there is nostalgia, and then there is impermissible nostalgia. Brooklyn is cool, apparently, while St. Louis isn't.

But it isn't just the Browns, although the Browns would be plenty of nostalgia for anyone. Eight fewer pennants than the "long-suffering Dodgers" ... one season in which they drew only 81,000 fans ... a one-armed outfielder and a three-foot-tall pinch-hitter ... Bill Veeck over Casey Stengel, about a hundred players clumsier than Babe Herman.

But what about the Philadelphia A's? The Washington Senators? The Boston Braves? The Cleveland Spiders? Surely there is enough hand-wringing about bringing back the good old days to reach everyone, isn't there?

Well, apparently not.

We don't wish to rain on the Cyclones' parade here. New Yorkers are as entitled to wallow in their own good old days as anyone else. Besides, Brooklyn gave us Jackie Robinson, the card that trumps every other one in the deck.

But to hear people who were born after the Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1957 tearing up on command in a burst of on-camera evoking only reminds us that baseball history in particular is way too Northeast-corner-centric.

The most egregious example may be the 1975 Red Sox, who didn't win the World Series. Because of Carlton Fisk's heroic home run to end Game 6, you never see any evidence that Game Seven was ever played, let alone that Cincinnati won it.

We'd like to blame this on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose accomplishments include a number of fine books and the ability to bleat on command about her "long-suffering Red Sox." But she's just a symptom, an example of the phenomenon rather than its cause.

In fact, Senators and Browns and fans did some real long-suffering. So did old A's and Braves fans. You think losing a seventh game to the Yankees was hard on the psyche? Try winning 38 games in an entire season, like the Browns did. Try finishing last eight years in a row, like the A's did. Try finishing in the second division 23 times in 27 years, like the Senators did.

You just don't hear them whining incessantly about it, let alone whining incessantly on inside-the-Beltway chat shows.

And I defy you to name a single person in America who wants to hear New York mayor Rudy Giuliani or Mets' co-owned Fred Wilpon going on about it. Dogs across America ran around in circles and howled like their feet were on fire when Rudy hauled out his pinched, adenoidal squeaking for ESPN. People taught their parrots to say "Shut The Hell Up" on command as a direct result.

Plus, we're sure that someone is already trying to make the Cyclones' first game will appear on ESPN Classic by week's end.

It's tyranny, I tell you. New York's nostalgia is no better than St. Louis', and in some ways isn't as good. It almost makes you wish Woody Allen had been born and raised on The Hill.

But why curse the darkness when you can light a highway flare to guide the world. Someone in St. Louis needs to resuscitate the Browns in some fashion, and bribe a bunch of snooty nostalgics-for-hire to go on and on interminably about Eddie Gaedel and Pete Gray and George Sisler while Chris Matthews and Cokie Roberts are trying to get a word in edgewise about John Ashcroft, Tom Daschle, or some other societal burden.

It will take a monumental effort, but we've blown much time and money on much stupider things over the decades.

Me? I'm already nostalgic for the Mahoning Valley Scrappers. They lost to the Cyclones, 3-2, on Monday night, and were barely mentioned in any reports on the game. By today's standards, that's some long suffering, Jack.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com