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2-1-09

2-1-09

Day 905 of 365 Again.

Tonight, I live in the greatest city on the face of the Earth.

It was a strain. It was scary. It maybe took 10 years off my life, but Superbowl XLIII is over, and the good guys were victorious.

I only barely remember the Steelers teams of the seventies. But I spent most of my life living the mythology of "one for the thumb." That happened three years ago. And then it was time to start working on the other hand.

Tonight, The Steelers did that. Winning a record 6th Superbowl, making them officially the greatest franchise in NFL history. At least in the modern era. Technically Green Bay has 12 NFL championships, but nine of those came in the pre-Superbowl era. The game was totally different then. Plastic helmets were illegal. As was the forward pass. Hell, until 1962 you were allowed to tackle guys by the facemask… of course, they didn’t even have facemasks til the 1950s and helmets weren’t even required by the NFL til the mod 1940s, and they were leather back then. Like I said, different game.

But that was then. This is now. And right now, the Pittsburgh Steelers are the only team in NFL history to have won six Superbowls. To quote my friend Max, "Suck on it, Dallas!"

GO STILLERS!

365 days

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10 comments for “2-1-09

  1. February 2, 2009 at 6:00 am

    I was rooting for the Steelers along with a bunch of others at a local bar. Gotta give it up to Big Ben for pulling it off again. Congratulations!

    Oh, please don’t say "Suck on it, San Francisco!".


    Seen on my Flickr home page. (?)

  2. February 2, 2009 at 8:59 am

    I had no allegiance. I wanted an exciting, fun game. They gave us one!

    Congratulations, Steelers!

  3. February 2, 2009 at 9:52 am

    Sigh…

    It was definitely a good game. Very painful to watch if you were rooting for the other team…but damn, one hell of a catch to win it.

    I’m still trying to figure out how the last play (Warner’s fumble) wasn’t reviewed. I’ve seen a lot of crazy was-it-or-was-it-not-a-forward-pass calls over the years — surely with 5 seconds left in the SUPER BOWL you should take some time for review, no?

    I’m not saying that as a bitter loser (I didn’t really care THAT much…I mean, nobody outside of Arizona is a Cardinals fan, right?), I’m just very baffled. If they change that call, tack on the I’m-an-idiot 15 yard penalty that was called — the final play could have been really exciting. Oh well…shoulda-coulda-woulda, right?

  4. February 2, 2009 at 10:50 am

    I mean, nobody outside of Arizona is a Cardinals fan, right?

    Umm, nobody inside Arizona is a Cardinals fan, either. The few people at their games before a couple of years ago were drunk ASU students who saw that someone was playing at their stadium and assumed it was the Sun Devils. The people at their games now are even drunker people who think the University of Phoenix is 1) a university and 2) a football school.

  5. February 2, 2009 at 11:06 am

    @Ernie E: eh… them too, I suppose… but mostly Dallas.

    @phlewght: too exciting… we were really hoping for boring.

    @d.rex: umm… I thought they did review it, maybe not. But for the record, in the last two minutes, the booth decides if it’s reviewable or not, not the ground officials. Basically, the booth official looks at the replay the same time we’re watching it on TV and if he thinks there’s any question at all then he calls down to the Referee and says "Hey, you should look at this." If it’s clear from the replay that there’s no chance of an overturn (as there was last night) they don’t bother. Steelers have been burned by that in the past and people bitch, but our color guy on the radio is always defending the replay booth official (he likes to look into the booth with binoculars) and the process and why stuff isn’t reviewable.

  6. February 2, 2009 at 11:09 am

    @d.rex: oh yeah… I was also going to answer the part about rooting against the steelers, but @Wooble beat me to it. Like the Cardinals really barely even exist. A lot of their games don’t even make TV because of blackouts since no one goes to the games. You’d think there’d be outrage, except no one actually realizes they have a football team, so they don’t care either.

  7. February 2, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    Oh yeah, I know the booth decides. My thinking is that if it’s not just DEAD OBVIOUS on the field (like the TD catch, for example), of course you review it to make sure the refs don’t ruin the game (they were doing their best to do so throughout, IMHO). And it definitely wasn’t dead obvious. Check out the photos here:

    fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/should-we-call-thi…

    Personally, I think they would have overturned it and I would have LOVED to have seen that final play from the 29 yard line (regardless of how it went).

    (oh, and yeah…I didn’t mean to imply that people IN Arizona were necessarily Cards fans either 🙂

  8. February 2, 2009 at 9:33 pm

    Woo Hooo!!!! Whew! It was a good evening in our home. But, man that last quarter was s.t.r.e.s.s.f.u.l.

  9. February 4, 2009 at 12:32 pm

    RAAAAAAAAHHHH STILLERS NATION PREVAILS!

    … Sorry. Even three days later, there’s still some leftover victory-rage. I love myself some PGH and I love the terrible towel in your photo.

  10. March 30, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    Just getting around to checking out your past stuff.

    This was a great moment!
    I talked to a Pitt friend the next day- she said the city was one huge party!

    Congrats to all of you up there!!!!!

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