Mornings were brutal. Jeff Hartings would swing his feet onto the floor and begin his days filled with wonder, trepidation. Would every step ache? Would a surgically repaired left knee give him a few, fleeting moments without pain, swelling, fret? Would this bring his NFL career to an early close?

		Preseason Game Two What: Texans at Steelers preseason game. Where: Heinz Field When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday TV/Radio: KDKA-TV / WDVE-FM (102.5), WBGG-AM (970) and the Steelers radio network.

"You didn't know how your knee was going to feel, but you wanted to play a game that week," the Steelers' starting center recalled of his vexing 2003 season.

"There was just anxiety all the time about how it was going to feel. Sometimes, it would feel good, strong. Sometimes, it would feel like I couldn't keep playing."

And yes, retirement was a constant thought. "You know, you have to think about it," he said.

Eight seasons, and done at age 31? The prospect nagged him, until the season finale.

"That Baltimore game at the end of the year, I went into it thinking to myself, 'If you don't enjoy going out there, a Sunday night game, at Baltimore, then you ought to retire,' " Hartings said. Somewhere in the second or third quarter, while chasing after Ray Lewis and friends, it struck him: This is too much fun.

The heart and mind were in agreement, and that balky left knee finally came around, too.

Because here is Hartings, grunting away, leading the offensive line in a St. Vincent College training camp one year from the worrisome week when he paid another visit to Dr. James Andrews in Birmingham, Ala., to seek out further reasons why his knee -- nine months after Andrews performed arthroscopic surgery -- still troubled him so.

Here is Hartings, saying with a sense of relief: "There still is pain, but you can take that. So football is fun again."

	Peter Diana, Post-Gazette Jeff Hartings Click photo for larger image.

A strange thing happened to his knee in the offseason: It got better. Relatively speaking, that is. Over the five months between last season and the spring mini-camps, the swelling dissipated. The strength returned. The enjoyment was restored.

"To me, having fun is flying around, running downfield," Hartings said. "Those are things I can't do when my knee is hurt."

"He is feeling better," added offensive line coach and assistant head coach Russ Grimm, "and he's having a good camp."

Getting here was the hard part. In addition to the chronic left knee, Hartings' left ankle had some loose cartilage, requiring offseason arthroscopic surgery. The right knee also needed to recover after an MCL sprain at Cleveland around Thanksgiving, a week that saw him arise from doubtful status and two injured knees to start against Cincinnati the next Sunday. He hardly missed contact practices, even though he was given a free pass by his surgeon and Steelers coaches.

He wanted to play the game every week, and he did just that, starting all 16 last season. It is the lineman's coda: Block it out Sunday, then block out the opposition. Despite all his ailments and moving to guard in that revolving-door line at Denver, Hartings played the best of his three Steelers seasons, Grimm concluded.

"It is amazing," Grimm said, with all that Hartings endured.

"He's not going to be real open about it. But we're all together so much, you could tell," added Alan Faneca, who starts next to Hartings at left guard. "Sometimes, it's one of those things, you might be banged up for a year or a couple of years. Then, you bounce back."

Hartings has rebounded, even if the knee hasn't completely.

But as Andrews informed him this time last year, there isn't enough cartilage left in his knee to cushion the bones from painfully rubbing against one another.

After the offseason rest, rehabilitation and ice, it's now a tolerable level of discomfort, without the accompanying swelling and worry and weakness.

"Last year, naturally, was a tough year, and frustrating," said Hartings, a Penn State product from St. Henry, Ohio, and a four-time Pro Bowl alternate whose first five NFL seasons were spent with Detroit.

"Because it was the second year of going through it [with the knee]. It took a lot of joy out of Sunday.

"I wanted to come back, but I didn't want to come back with all the things I had to do [to be hale enough to play]. I didn't think the game is worth that at this point in my career, with five kids and a wife."

Season No. 9 began in familiar Detroit last weekend, in a preseason game, where Hartings perhaps was most noticeable to the untrained eye by getting knocked backward into Jerome Bettis once, helping to stop his teammate for no gain. Duce Staley, however, bolted for 45 yards on 11 carries, and Tommy Maddox had ample time to complete four of his five attempts -- without a sack. Improvement continues to come for a battered, maligned line that permitted just seven sacks and helped the Steelers average 116 yards rushing over the final four games last season.

"He's a smart guy," Grimm said of the center who makes the Steelers' line calls.

"He can coordinate both sides of the line and get both sides on the same page. It's just a consistency factor, you know what you're going to get from him. What he did last year, it's a credit to him."

"Even now in training camp, I feel it," Hartings added of the left knee. "It's not like I'm going to have no pain. But I feel like I can go out and not have it pain me like it did last year.

"If I got into a situation like last year, I don't know if I'd go through it again."