The Cleveland Indians need a new name. Here’s a winner…

Like it or not, it’s adios Indians.

Chances are good that by opening day next year, my beloved #ClevelandIndians will be called something else.

Oh, we’ve called our ball team a lot of names over the years: losers, whiners and when they’ve played well, we love our “Windians.”

The Cleveland ball club put out a statement on July 3 saying it will engage the community and “appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regard to the team name.”

The times they are a changin’ and it’s time we changed.

Washington’s National Football League team announced it was reviewing the team’s name after stadium sponsor FedEx gave them the nudge. FedEx released a statement saying, “We have communicated to the team in Washington our request they change the team name.” When money talks, racism walks.

The term “Redskins” is so offensive, some journalists and sportscasters refuse to say the team name. The Portland Oregonian stopped printing the name in 1991.

As Clyde Bellecourt, executive director of the American Indian Movement and a Chippewa, told The New York Times, “We’re trying to convince people we’re human beings not mascots.”

Why now?

Because when you know better, you do better.

And we know better than to name mascots and sports teams after an Indigenous people that our country slaughtered and nearly wiped into extinction.

That means there should be no more Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Chiefs, Washington Redskins or Cleveland Indians. No more fans painting their faces red, wearing feathers and tomahawking for the cameras.

And, no, we can’t just call our team The Tribe. That would still keep us stuck in a racially insensitive past that must be buried.

History is told by the victors, not the victims, and the story we’ve been telling ourselves for years is that the Indians were named to honor Louis Sockalexis, a member of the Penobscot tribe and one of the first Native Americans to play professional baseball. When he played, our team was named the Cleveland Spiders.

So what do we call our team now?

A lot of names have been tossed around on social media. Angry people are suggesting names like The Snowflakes, the Cupcakes, the Sell Outs, the Cowards and the Caucasians.

Major League Baseball has the Cardinals, Blue Jays and Orioles. Why not the Lake Gulls, the Buzzards or the Midges? We all loved seeing those bugs befriend us during that infamous game when they attacked the New York Yankees.

The Cleveland Walleyes is an option. As someone funnier than I wrote, the merchandise would be off the hook.

We could go back to the Cleveland Spiders, but it was a National League team that played poorly, plus spiders creep out most people.

My sister suggested we name them God’s Team. She’s a die-hard fan. It would be pretty amusing every time an announcer said, “And now God’s Team is up to bat.” Of course that would never fly.

How about the Blue Sox? The American League has the Red Sox and the White Sox. When our team was founded in 1901, it was called the Bluebirds or Blues in their first year in the American League.

We could pick something Cleveland is known for, like the Lake Shores, Cleveland Burns or the Apollos, with a nod to NASA Glenn, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong.

A lot of people are suggesting names like Cleveland Rocks, the Cleveland Rockers, the Cleveland Rock and Rollers or the Cleveland Rockies to reflect our connection to the Rockefellers, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Alan Freed, the Cleveland DJ who coined the words Rock ’n Roll.

No matter what, changing the name won’t be easy. Change never is. It’s likely we won’t get to choose the name, but we might be heard.

So if anyone is listening, I vote we name our baseball team the Cleveland Guardians after the Guardians of Transportation that stand sentry on the Hope Memorial Bridge just around the corner from our baseball diamond.

At 43-feet tall, those massive art deco statues look like they’re guarding both sides of the city. They offer endless possibilities for branding and merchandise. We could replicate their wings on baseball caps and jerseys.

Right now, the four guardians hold a truck, auto, covered wagon and stagecoach. For our ball team, they could hold a baseball, a glove, home plate and the commissioner’s trophy in the hope that we actually do win a World Series.

And once they do, it won’t matter what we call them.

We’ll be too happy to care.