Growing Up Rivals

I apologize to those few of you who may have been regularly reading my ramblings.  This has been something of a hectic week, and a few days ago, I lost my best friend.  My dear cat Haplo, companion of fourteen years, shuffled off this mortal furball and is now preparing to watch the Steelers stomp the Browns for the tenth time in a row from a much better vantage point.  Miss ya, buddy.  Anyway, that kind of put me off wanting to do much of anything for a couple days, but here I am, back for the attack.

So far most of my posts have been rather analytical, talking about the team and stats and so forth.  But I'd like to look at the Steelers/Browns rivalry from a personal standpoint today.  This is the classic NFL rivalry to anybody from western Pensylvania or most of easten Ohio.  I went to college for a while in Youngstown, right in the epicenter of it all, and lemme tell ya, those were the best Sundays of my time there.  Everywhere you looked, it was black and gold or orange and brown (with the occasional black, white and red of the YSU Penguins thrown in).

Growing up in western Pennsylvania means football is in your blood, whether you want it to be or not.  People talk about how Texans are football nuts, but I have five letters for "Friday Night Lights": WPIAL.  A three-step, three-day weekly autumn ritual: high-school games on Friday nights, Saturday afternoons for college ball and Sundays belonging to the Steelers.  Those days are as much a part of me as my current life as a father.

So what if the days I'm thinking in specific about were the end of the Bubby Brister (argh!) era and the beginning of Neil O'Donnell's (our receivers wear black and gold, dummy!) false promise.  Every time the Steelers and the Browns collided in those venerable old stadiums, it was pure magic.  Terrible Towels.  The Dawg Pound.  Bone-crunching, in-your-face smashmouth football.  I even cheered for the Browns when they made the playoffs and we didn't, because hey, any AFC Central team was better than no AFC Central team, right?  Unless it was the Oilers, of course.  Those guys were aliens from somewhere way down south.

I moved away, and moved on to other things.  Years went by.  Then I happened to catch a playoff game...  The AFC Central had been taken apart and put back together as the AFC North, and hey, look, it's the Steelers, the Bungles, the former Browns and the new Browns, and no weird alien guys in powder blue from Texas!  The Steelers went through some QB weirdness, and then suddenly there's this new hotshot named Roethlisberger and not only is he good, he's enduring (nevermind that motorcycle thing; I think common sense got knocked into him, thankfully).  Who's this Bettis guy?  Whoa, the wheels on the bus go round and round over everybody's faces...  One word: wow.

And I found that I could still smell the hot dogs and sausages.  I could still hear, "Here we go Steelers, here we go!"  And I could still feel the crunch of black and gold on orange and brown.  The NFL had given us back our Browns when I wasn't looking.  That's right, I said our Browns, because your worst rival is the best part of you.  It was still all there, waiting for me, and I came back like it knew I would.  Like a western Pennsylvania boy.

Now it's Saturday, September 13, 2008, and tomorrow night the Steelers look to ring the Browns' bell for the tenth time in a row.  Ben Roethlisberger has never lost to Cleveland, and judging from last week I think I'll be saying that still come Monday.  I can already tell the Browns are missing Joe Jurevicius, and I already want to give Romeo Crennel a big hug and tell him it'll be all right (seriously, the guy looks like somebody's sad uncle).

But that's how it goes in the AFC Cent-- Excuse me.  AFC North.  I have to catch myself all the time with that one.  It's just part of the history between our teams.  The fields have changed, and the old Browns packed off to Baltimore.  But it's Pittsburgh versus Cleveland, black and gold versus orange and brown, and that magic is forever.