football memories, part I

All you need to know about how insane Steelers Fever is back home ... they're adding a two-hour delay to Pittsburgh-area schools tomorrow morning.

To be honest, I'm not "from" Pittsburgh; I grew up about an hour west, in far eastern Ohio, right on the Ohio River, in a depressed area thatlong ago had its own identity but now has nothing of significance to which it can cling. It's always been Steelers Country, or at least since the mid 1970s ... the Steelers love is pretty strong, but it's just a degree less so than in Pittsburgh proper. So there won't be any two-hour delays in my old school district, but that doesn't mean students (and some teachers) won't be dragging tomorrow morning.

My first memories of Steelers' football go back to the third week of January 1980. My aunt Cindy had joined the Air Force, and the whole family took her to the Pittsburgh airport to see her off to boot camp. There were Steelers banners all over the place. It sure seems like we went dahntahn before we went to the airport, because I recall the tall buildings and the black and gold banners hanging from lamp posts and street signs.

(Later, as city fathers found fewer and fewer surfaces from which to exclaim the city's love of its fooball team, they graduated to dinosaur skeletons.)



So I remember celebrations after the Steelers beat the (then) Los Angeles Rams, and the loud cries for "One for the Thumb" that opened the 1980 regular season. What I don't remember is any of the years leading up to that season, which means that I totally missed the "glory years" of my favorite team. My first real football memory? Crying uncontrollably after church, on the last day of the 1980 season, because the Steelers didn't make the playoffs. But they have to play every team twice! They still have time! I was pissed. How could this happen? To me? To my team?

Dad patiently explained that not every team is played twice -- just the teams in the division. But I was royally pissed off. As I was a few years later, when they were destroyed by the Chargers in the first round of the playoffs. And the next year, when the Raiders -- the Raiders! -- knocked them out in the first round. And the next year, when they made it to the AFC Championship game but were vivisected by Dan Marino -- whom we had a chance to draft, but stuck with Mark Malone instead -- and the Dolphins.

I could go on -- 15 years of heartbreaks in the playoffs. The only "good" year was 1995, when they went to the Super Bowl and were two backbreaking Neil O'Donnell interceptions from defeating a very beatable Dallas Cowboys squad ...

My point: since I was able to understand football, the team I loved more than words could describe always managed to tease me with hints of its former glory, but in the end it let me down -- sometimes valiantly, sometimes with a Hindenburg-esque collapse ... but always and forever disappointing me.

In Part II: My love is vindicated!