There's nothing like a winning team to make us all feel good about ourselves. In fact, we're feeling so good right now, you might have thought that we (you and I) had something to do with the Steelers' dominating march to the Super Bowl.

		Charlie Humphrey is executive director of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (charlieh@pghfilmmakers.org).

Why do we feel so powerfully responsible for our team's success? Because we knew something, collectively, that no one else in the country seemed to know. The Steelers are very good.

A decade ago I wrote an opinion piece in the Post-Gazette about what I described as Pittsburgh's "mass hysterical low self-esteem." Back then I blamed Myron Cope, reasoning that if you love him, then you hate yourself for loving him, and if you hate him, you hate yourself for living in a city that worships someone like him. I happen to love Myron, and miss him terribly on the air. What a time to retire. Imagine if Jerome Bettis had followed him into pension land last year?

Here's the thing about our collective self-esteem as it relates to football and to the grander realities of life. A Steelers trip to the Super Bowl vindicates us. On one level, it's simple "I told you so" stuff.

Stuff, as in, Ben is as good as anyone in the game right now. But really, we are feeling vindicated on a much higher level. As in, we know this is a great city. We see what others cannot.

Our taste in football matches our choice in hometowns. Others saw a sixth-seed, 11-5 team entering the playoffs with little or no hope of going anywhere. We saw a scrappy, hungry, talented team led by people who look and sound an awful lot like us. Others see a rusted, broken manufacturing town. We see health care, world-class arts organizations, green spaces and people of profound character. Hey, we were right about the Steelers and we are right about us.

I'm by no means the first person to point out the obvious Steelers-as-metaphor model. I can well recall the great John Facenda narrating NFL films in the 1970s that pounded the point in. But the truth is, the Steelers don't mirror us. Would you want to be known for our hockey or baseball? There's an old saying: "I am not my golf game," meaning, I'm OK but my golf stinks.

It has more to do with how we feel about the Steelers, how we feel about the Rooneys and how we feel about an underdog team that has demonstrated nothing short of brilliance these past several weeks. How we honestly feel about a city that was once a Top 10 market, an industrial powerhouse that still has the residue of success embedded in nearly every limestone facade. A city that not only knows what it was, but what it is now.

If only the rest of the world could be as easily convinced as the Denver Broncos.