Kyle Goon: After all their changes, the Ravens were supposed to be past choking. They aren’t.

There have probably been only a handful of Sundays in the last 30 years when it felt objectively better to be wearing Cleveland brown than Ravens purple.

Todd Monken has worn both. But on Sunday he must have felt unchained, unfettered. Free of Baltimore’s expectations — and its curses.

I wonder if there was a fleeting moment in that fourth quarter when Monken thought about the now famous Mike Tomlin quote about the Ravens: “When it’s a dying moment, they will try to burn the house down.”

The house, once again, is ash. The Ravens love to find ways to burn down their leads, as they did in a 13-10 loss on the road to the Browns. It’s a haunted legacy that we can now see transcends any one player or coach.

Once upon a time, you could assume these struggles could largely be attributed to John Harbaugh. Over an 18-year tenure, he was synonymous with the Ravens’ successes but also their shortcomings.

Some folks thought that these choke jobs wouldn’t stop until the Ravens got rid of Harbaugh, that it was his approach that led to so many leads slipping out of their grasp. Such losses were why owner Steve Bisciotti justified firing Harbaugh, whom he counted as a close friend.

I’ve never thought it was quite that simple — and this loss, with Harbaugh long in the rearview, is proof that it isn’t. The buck stops with the head coach, but all the Ravens deserve credit for how they lose leads and games in the most frustrating ways imaginable.

When the Ravens are choking, the way they crumble has a distinctive aura. You can feel it in the air. Think of all the things that had to go wrong, with every phase contributing to the letdown:

• An offense that started out scoring 10 points in the first two possessions never scored again. Yes, the Ravens had backup QB Tyler Huntley instead of Lamar Jackson, but if we were willing to give him the glory after he went 11-for-11 in the final stretch of a win in Atlanta, we have to give him the blame for going just 5-for-10 for 58 yards in the second half against the Browns. He and coordinator Declan Doyle also have to answer for a number of procedural penalties, including multiple delays of game.
• Derrick Henry gave up a backbreaking fumble that put Cleveland in Baltimore territory and led to the Browns’ only touchdown. Henry’s fumbles hurt the team last year, too, notably contributing to Buffalo’s comeback win in the season opener — one of the Ravens’ worst chokes.
• The Ravens defense went from harassing Deshaun Watson into going 3-for-9 in the first half to becoming a sieve in the second. Watson went 13-for-19 for 140 yards after halftime, and though the Ravens sacked him twice and hurried him five times, he looked much more confident and his deep pass to Jerry Jeudy helped set up the game-winning field goal. Head coach Jesse Minter came in with the reputation of a defensive guru but has struggled to plug up drives on third downs.
• Speaking of field goals, Tyler Loop missed another sub-50-yard attempt, going wide left on a kick that could have made the game go to overtime instead of ending on a loss. Loop has improved dramatically on long kicks, going 5-for-5 on 50-plus-yard attempts. But he’s just 2-for-4 on kicks from 40-49 yards.

I understand why the Ravens were eager to frame last week’s triumph in Atlanta as a bookend to their fourth-quarter struggles. When Kyle Hamilton announced “this is a game we have lost many times” in his postgame presser, it was a genuine sentiment but not precisely accurate. The Ravens’ biggest wins this season have been come-from-behind or tit-for-tat affairs: a game-winning drive at the end of regulation in Rio against Dallas after a back-and-forth battle and a game-tying drive last week that led to them dominating in OT.

We’ve seen this season that the Ravens are capable of rising up when they hit the mat and coming back to win. We haven’t seen that they’re capable of staying ahead when they’re expected to romp — actually, we’ve seen significant evidence that they’re still haunted by their old ways.

They were leading the Saints by two scores at home before New Orleans rallied. If the Titans were halfway competent, they had an outside chance to make a game out of what was initially a lopsided affair in Baltimore. The Browns’ comeback is the cruelest of all — after what felt like a soaring victory against the Falcons, an AFC North rival brutally reminded the Ravens that one game doesn’t get you over the hump.

Monken took tons of heat in several of these games, blistered for not trusting the run game enough, especially when he let Henry wither on the sideline. It turns out it wasn’t solely a Monken problem, or a Harbaugh problem. Jackson has been starting for a bunch of these games, but clearly it’s not just his problem either.

Minter has attempted to tackle rebuilding Ravens culture with a tagline: “We need to play our best when our best is needed.” But rooting out a tendency this deeply entrenched cannot be accomplished with a slogan. A coaching change might not be enough, either.

The change in poise has to come from the players, and they know it. Nnamdi Madubuike and Hamilton both said the Ravens need to win these games. Henry said his fumbles can’t happen. But the mission statements need to evolve into action, and I don’t think it’s up to a coach to lead the Ravens there. They have to grow up.

Sunday’s Browns victory does not absolve Monken of his part in some of those more dispiriting Ravens letdowns in years past, but it had to be satisfying to be on the other side of it.

Even though Andre Szmyt missed a fourth-quarter field goal that could have put the Browns up before the last play of the game, Monken might have comforted himself with a thought:

We’ll get another chance to win — it’s the Ravens, after all.