It’s been a bad year for sports fans here in Baltimore – a really bad twelve months or so.  First the Ravens played a meaningless game against the Dolphins on January 2, 2005 to end a disappointing year that fell apart quickly.  Then the Terps failed to make the 2005 NCAA Tourney.  The last time that happened we didn’t even know who Monica, Rachel and Phoebe were.  Then the Orioles teased us but ultimately failed to please us as their pennant hopes slipped faster than a three legged cat on a frozen litter box.

Enter the Ravens again and after a 2-4 start and Ray Lewis calling it a season, the Holiday sugar plums that danced in our heads consisted of a new offensive line, a consistent quarterback and the promise of Terps basketball again.

And now Chris McCray is out for the season and the spin doctors are saying we should just view it as a season ending injury.  Will the losing ever stop?  Can it possibly get any worse?

Uh-huh.

The Pittsburgh Steelers are in Super Bowl XL.

And how fitting is that?  The Steelers have an XL running back, a coach with an XL saliva gland, a LB with an XL mouth, a receiver that whines like an XL baby and a safety that looks like an XL troll.  Their quarterback isn’t XL though, he’s just big.

But here we are, less than two weeks from the Super Bowl and the team we despise the most will be shoved down our throats ad nausea for the next two weeks.  The Bus is heading home to Detroit.  Can Cowher’s team end the drought?  And gee doesn't Ben Roethlisberger show such great poise?

Can someone please pass the Pepto?

In his 14 seasons as a head coach, Bill Cowher has led the Steelers to the AFC Championship 6 times and to the Super Bowl twice.  Up until now, the Ravens’ faithful could at least serve up a dose of the Lombardi Trophy whenever they engaged in trash talk with the Terrible Towel-aban.  But that final arrow in the collective quiver of Ravens’ fans might no longer be available if the Steelers keep their mojo alive in Motown.

Back here in our town on Sunday, I stumbled upon an unsettling sight.  While taking in the Broncos v. Steelers game at one of my favorite Canton establishments with some friends, I walked across the square to an ATM at halftime.  One block to the east there it was.  Right there in the heart of Baltimore – right there just off the Canton Square where only 5 years prior a town heavily draped in purple celebrated a red letter day in sports history – right there just a Vanderjagt shank away was a party.  It wasn’t just any party.  No this festive gathering was so robust that its participants would take turns falling and stumbling out the front door and down the steps, adorned in black and gold and waving those putrid towels with such enthusiasm I thought they might blow a rotator cuff. 

It was as though I was a Confederate soldier and the Union Army just stuck their flag in my turf!  Like one might do with cockroaches, I wondered where these Steelers fans came from.

Aren’t there any jobs in Pittsburgh?

Can't Spherion find these misplaced mutants employment somewhere in Altoona?

Pittsburgh isn’t such a bad town.  It is a tad quirky and in some ways it seems to be a decade or so behind the times.  Maybe that’s why seemingly year after year it is voted as the worst city for singles.  Maybe everyone just gets married at an early age – maybe there’s not much to do.  And those that aren’t married they skip out because last time I checked the steel, iron and glass industries were off; USAir may as well be USGround and apparently there isn’t enough ketchup consumption for Heinz to pick up the slack.

So there they were in all their glory waving their terrycloth penalty flags and piercing the air with their chants and screams in our town.  Talk about kicking a city when it’s down.

It made me wonder what it might feel like to be them.  Not that I want to be a Steelers fan but I wondered if it was better to have been in the playoffs so often – to go deep into the playoffs 6 out of 14 seasons, than to have won one Super Bowl and only 1 other playoff game during our team’s ten year existence.

No way – no way in hell!  That magical season of 2000 represents the pinnacle of Baltimore fandom and it is our trump card that we play often during debates with the Towel-aban faithful.

But in less than two weeks, that trump card may no longer be available and you will pray for a resurgence in the steel industry.  The Steelers just might get that one for the thumb and this dreadful year in sport will plunge further into the abyss with no end in sight.

Hey, did someone say Anna Benson?