Baltimore, take a seat on the therapist’s couch. Please.

We need to sort through some issues that have festered for nearly two-and-a-half decades. At the risk of pouring salt into very fresh wounds, we need to talk about Baltimore’s fixation with the old Colts.

It seemed like everything I heard or read last week leading up to the Ravens-Colts playoff game ranged from acute suffering over the Colts leaving town 23 years ago to unbridled vitriol for late owner Bob Irsay. I just have one question: Why?

It’s time to move on, Baltimore. It has been 23 years. Your children have grown up. The Inner Harbor has been revitalized. Presidents have come and gone. Everything has changed … except you.

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There are most certainly football fans with something to gripe about. You are not one of them.

New Orleans, a devastated city with a team that only now looks competitive, has reason to complain. So do Cardinals fans, who haven’t experienced playoff football this decade. And Cleveland, which lost its beloved Browns to you, Baltimore, stunk before the fact and continues to stink.

The Ravens, meanwhile, won a Super Bowl just six years ago and have reached the playoffs three times since then. So why the moaning and groaning? Who reminisces about a girlfriend who jilted him 20 years ago when he currently has a beautiful wife who treats him right?

What’s most disturbing about this whole mess is the hypocritical wrath still directed towards a dead man and his family. You won’t forgive something that happened 23 years ago, yet you dress your children in the jerseys of men who obstruct justice in murder trials and whose phones are used in drug deals.

Shame on you, Baltimore.

You howl that the Baltimore Colts’ records, trophies, logo and colors should have remained in this city, yet you disgrace your current team and blend history to your own liking by wearing purple Unitas jerseys. It’s like a child who has a handful of lollipops but grabs some from other children around him just because he’s grumpy.

Here’s a fact of life: Sports is a business. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be enjoying it like you do now — 70,000-seat stadiums, around-the-clock media coverage, etc. And with the business of sports comes experiences that are difficult — but not impossible — to swallow.

You aren’t alone in feeling the pain of losing a pro team, but you sure act like it. Scores of major cities — from Boston to San Francisco and everywhere in between — have lost pro franchises in football, baseball and basketball. Unlike some of them, though, you got another and it has been very good to you.

So please, do us all a favor and move on. Embrace your current team, forget the past and start the long-overdue recuperation process.

And now, I’ll expect the worst — enough hate mail to fill a Mayflower moving truck, perhaps. For the sake of a city’s healing, I hope I’m wrong.

Joshua Cooley is the sports editor at The Examiner. You can reach him at jcooley@baltimoreexaminer.com.