It began around 11 a.m. the Monday after the conclusion of the World Series.

The cops revved their motorcycles, the thundering drums of a high school marching band began to thump, and confetti and streamers started falling from the high-rise office windows.

The procession moved down Euclid Avenue and toward Public Square, where some 50,000 fans were gathered to greet and to cheer their baseball heroes. Clad almost exclusively in red and blue, waving flags and clutching signs bearing words of support, the crowd of rabid rooters made it clear that the 1995 Cleveland Indians had won over many a heart in Northeast Ohio.

Even though they hadn’t won the World Series.

“Today,” Ohio Gov. George V. Voinovich announced, “Cleveland is the greatest baseball town in the world!”

This was quite a claim, considering that 555 miles to the southwest, the 1995 World Series champion Atlanta Braves were holding the victor’s parade that very same day.

But the parade held in Cleveland shortly after a heartbreaking Game 6 is testament to what that team meant to its town. The ’95 club didn’t win the World Series trophy, but it did revive a franchise, enliven a region and, for whatever it’s worth, cement itself in the conversation of greatest teams to have come up short in October.

That 1995 club won 100 games of a strike-shortened, 144-game regular season. It had a staggering lineup, built around Albert Belle’s MVP runner-up effort, but also featuring Hall of Famers Jim Thome at third and Eddie Murray at DH, star talent up the middle with Carlos Baerga at second and Omar Vizquel at short, and Kenny Lofton patrolling center next to a young right fielder named Manny Ramirez, who batted seventh.

And although it was a club known for its offensive might, the pitching was not too shabby, either. Dennis Martinez, Charles Nagy and Orel Hershiser fronted the rotation, and Jose Mesa had a 46-save season.

“Our ’95 team was pretty incredible,” Belle told MLB.com in 2012. “We probably would have gotten way more credit had we won the World Series that year.”

But they didn’t, because of a Braves pitching staff fronted by Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz that limited those once-potent Cleveland bats to a .179 average en route to Atlanta's only World Series title in the Bobby Cox era.

But considering all the dog days that had preceded that season -- the rumors that the franchise would move to St. Petersburg, Dime Beer Night, the Rocky Colavito trade, the ill-fated Joe Carter/Cory Snyder Sports Illustrated cover, the untimely deaths of Steve Olin and Tim Crews -- what the team accomplished in its beautiful new ballpark has stayed with people a very long time.

And as proved by that parade, sometimes even runners-up are worthy of celebration.

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“It was one of those magical seasons,” then-manager Mike Hargrove once said, “when everything we did worked.”

Eventually.

The year began, of course, with that most bizarre of Spring Training camps, with replacement players filling the clubhouse at the complex in Winter Haven, Fla. The players’ strike that had abruptly ended the ’94 campaign threatened to jeopardize ’95, too. And for a Cleveland team that had christened Jacobs (now Progressive) Field in ’94 and was seemingly on the cusp of something special, this was a punch to the gut.

“We had Albert Belle, Kenny Lofton, Sandy Alomar Jr., Jim Thome,” said then-general manager John Hart, “and instead we’re trotting out Larry, Curly and Moe!”

Only in retrospect can we truly appreciate the scouting and swapping successes that built that roster. The farm system produced Belle, Ramirez, Nagy and Thome. The trade that sent Carter to San Diego landed both Alomar and Baerga. Cleveland also got a steal of a deal both for Lofton (acquired from the Astros for Eddie Taubensee) and for Vizquel (acquired from the Mariners for Felix Fermin and Reggie Jefferson). The finishing touches in free agency were the veterans Murray, Martinez and Hershiser.

All these pieces were ready to mesh into a winner. Cleveland just needed the opportunity to use them.

“This is bull----,” infield coach Buddy Bell said aloud one day while watching the replacements go through their drills.

Yep, pretty much.

But baseball’s strangest spring reached its merciful crescendo on April 2, when the 232-day strike ended. The players reported to a condensed camp, with a 144-game schedule set to begin the final week of April.

What nobody could have known then was how much damage Cleveland would do in that abbreviated time frame.

* * * * * * * *

Cleveland won the American League Central by 30 games. Even more incredible, especially by shortened-season standards, was that it won 27 games in its final at-bat.

On July 16, Cleveland was trailing Oakland, 4-3, in the 12th, when Ramirez went to bat against Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley with a man on and two out. Manny drove the first pitch into the bleachers to give his team -- what else? -- a walk-off win. Eckersley mouthed one word as he watched the ball disappear:

“Wow!”

Cleveland inspired that word a lot.

Two days later, Belle had the signature moment of what should have been an MVP season. The Angels had a 5-3 lead, with the dominant Lee Smith coming in for the ninth. But Cleveland put runners on the corners with one out, and Smith walked Baerga to bring up Belle.

Big mistake. With a now-standard sellout crowd on its feet, Belle blasted a 1-2 hanging slider to the picnic plaza in dead center field. (“Albert hit it in the pork and beans,” Smith would say.)

Grand slam. Ballgame.

“That night,” said broadcaster Tom Hamilton, “was when you knew that club was really special.”

The special season rolled on, propelled by Belle’s absurd, 16-homer August. With a league-best 50 homers, 52 doubles and 126 RBIs that year, Belle should have been an easy MVP choice over Mo Vaughn, but his reputation with reporters preceded him.

Regardless, individual honors paled in comparison to what the team accomplished -- a .694 winning percentage that stands as the fourth-best in MLB in the expansion era, bettered only by the 2020 Dodgers at .717, the 2001 Mariners at .716 and the 1998 Yankees at .704. The stacked lineup -- in which the Nos. 7 and 8 hitters (Ramirez and Paul Sorrento) combined for 56 homers -- averaged 5.83 runs per game.

“I never saw the ’27 Yankees,” said Jason Bere, then a pitcher for the White Sox. “But the ’95 Indians? Whoa.”

By the time the calendar flipped to September, the division title was a foregone conclusion, but that didn’t make the clinch any less sweet.

That came on Sept. 8. The Indians staked Hershiser to a 3-2 lead against the Orioles. With two outs in the ninth, Mesa got Jeff Huson to hit a harmless popup to foul territory near third base, and Thome caught it in his outstretched glove to cue a celebration more than four decades in the making.

* * * * * * * *

Cleveland’s first postseason game in 41 years began on a Tuesday night, ended on a Wednesday morning and will be remembered for a lifetime by those who witnessed it.

Roger Clemens might remember it as the night he was warming up to start for the Red Sox when he heard a voice yelling at him from his opponents' dugout.

“We’re going to kill you!” the voice blared.

It was Baerga.

“We were so cocky,” Baerga would later say.

The game, twice delayed by rain, was tied at 3 after nine. Boston took the lead in the top of the 11th, but Belle answered with a solo shot in the bottom of the frame. Red Sox manager Kevin Kennedy, well aware of Belle’s corked-bat incident from ’94, asked the umpires to investigate Belle’s bat. Belle glared at the mound, flexed his right bicep and pointed to it, indicating that the power was all muscle. An investigation of the bat confirmed as much.

But who could have thought that the hero of Game 1 would not be the muscular Belle but little catcher Tony Peña? It was just after 2 a.m. when Peña stepped to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the 13th. He swung at a 3-0 pitch from Zane Smith and smacked it into the left-field bleachers.

“That was a moment I’m never going to forget,” said Peña, “and nobody is going to take away from me.”

Cleveland swept the three-game series, setting up the ALCS against the “Refuse to Lose” Mariners club. That series was tied at 2-2 going into Game 5. As cocky as they were, Cleveland’s players knew they were in trouble if they lost at home and had to return to Seattle to face both Randy Johnson and elimination.

Thome didn’t let that happen. With his team down, 2-1, in the bottom of the sixth, he took Mariners starter Chris Bosio deep for a two-run homer that gave Cleveland a 3-2 lead it would not relinquish.

In Game 6, with Cleveland up 1-0 and one on in the eighth, Lofton took over. He reached on a bunt single to put runners on the corners against Johnson, then swiped second base. And when Johnson threw a pitch that got past catcher Dan Wilson, not only did pinch-runner Ruben Amaro score from third, but Lofton came in all the way from second.

Cleveland won that game, 4-0, to clinch its first World Series berth since ’54. Legend Bob Feller, then 76, was so swept up in the moment that he rushed the field. A security guard tried to arrest him before realizing who the excited old man was.

That emotion extended to all members of the team. Hart was brought to tears.

“I couldn’t help myself,” Hart said. “I get choked up talking about it now. You think back to how we acquired all these guys and say, ‘Isn’t this just amazing? Little Cleveland. Who would have thought?’”

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Maybe the emotion of the run to the World Series sapped the club’s strength. Or maybe the umpires gave Maddux, Glavine and Steve Avery too wide a strike zone. Or maybe good pitching simply beats good hitting.

Whatever the reason, the end result was a Series in which Cleveland fell behind, 2-0, in Atlanta and never recovered, losing it in six.

The Braves won 14 straight division titles in that span but only one World Series. The lone triumph came against a Cleveland team that posted one of the highest regular-season winning percentages of all time. Go figure.

And yet, the city of Cleveland threw the club a party anyway. Upon their return from Atlanta, the players and coaches boarded a bus to Public Square, where the faithful and undaunted had arranged a giant show of thanks.

They would show it in other ways, too. The entire 1996 home slate sold out before Opening Day. A string of 455 consecutive sellouts -- a remarkable figure for one of baseball’s smaller markets -- had begun.

The ’95 Central crown was the first of six in a seven-season span for Cleveland, which would come even closer to winning it all in ’97 (a source of heartbreak all its own, and another runner-up squad that received a parade).

But the ’95 club was the best and most dominant of any in the Cleveland baseball renaissance of the 1990s. That lethal lineup scorched baseball’s earth like few before it or since and, in so doing, stirred long-slumbering emotions in a city that had been begging for winning baseball.

No wonder it was feted with a procession through the Cleveland streets.

Said Thome: “You couldn’t have told if we won it or lost it.”