Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Laura Garber's husband, Chad, is a huge Steelers fan and convinced her to paint her belly for Super Bowl XL. Care to guess what colors their baby will be wrapped in?

By Robert Dvorchak , Pittsburgh Post-Gazette In the halcyon days of the Roman Empire, when a conquering general brought back the spoils of war to the cheering throngs lined on the parade route of the Via Sacra, a slave dressed as the goddess of victory would follow behind and whisper a warning: "You are mortal. You are mortal. You are mortal." In Pittsburgh last week, when The Bus cradled that silver football in his meaty hands while riding in a canary yellow Corvette with black leather seats along the sharply angled avenues of the modern Sacred Way, a quarter of a million revelers shouted at the top of their victorious lungs: "Steelers! Wooooooooooooooooooooo."

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While it is true that all glory is fleeting and that time grinds winners and losers into the same powdery dust, the Nation savored its moment in the sun by cutting loose with a whoop on a day so rare that confetti trumped the snow flurries and the color combination of black and gold defeated gray skies.

The beauty of a championship -- as eternal as classic Latin -- radiates from the glow of accomplishment, of being the best in the world at what you do for one moment in time, of allowing a fanatic following to raise their fingers in a collective No. 1. And nobody can ever take it away.

Nobody. Not the whiners, the moaners, the crybaby coaches or the gabby gasbags on the TV sports shows.

The communication device du jour is a blog, or web log, where any halfwit with a computer can send off opinions into cyberspace. I've never written one, but I have been putting my name on stories for nearly XL years.

I got my first newspaper job in 1967, five months after the first NFL-AFL championship game and a month before the 82nd Airborne was deployed to quell a fiery race riot in Detroit.

Back in the day, newsrooms had manual typewriters and ashtrays, and the print shop set type in hot metal galleys. Vince Lombardi was the coach of the Green Bay Packers, not the name on the Super Bowl trophy.

In 39 years, I've reported on Legionnaires Disease, Three Mile Island, the collapse of the steel industry, the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, Desert Storm, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, plane crashes, train wrecks, the first World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing. Then I covered the Pirates for five seasons and the plight of Sidney Crosby and the Penguins. You pick the one that took the worst emotional toll.

Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Jerome Bettis, Bill Cowher and the Lombardi Trophy together in victory. Click photo for larger image.

I didn't ask to cover the Super Bowl any more than I asked to be combat correspondent with the 82nd Airborne during the first Gulf War, but when the boss said to drop everything and go, I headed out to a place that Baby Boomers call Hitsville, USA.

Game coverage was the domain of the Post-Gazette writers and columnists who follow the Steelers through the course of the season. My assignment was to convey what the moment meant to Pittsburgh. If I were employed by a Seattle paper, I would have written the loser's side, just like I had to do after Super Bowl XXX and two AFC championship game losses to the New England Patriots.

A journalist's job requires objectivity and arm's-length detachment. Unlike columnists, I get paid to keep my opinions out of the paper. At its most basic, you write down what happens, not what should have, could have or would have happened.

Football is a game. War is life or death. I learned the difference when I had to sit on a cargo plane next to the metal coffin of a dead American soldier on my way back from Iraq.

	Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Steelers owner Dan Rooney shows his appreciation for the fans while on stage during the victory celebration Downtown. Ask any Steelers fan and the sentiment is sure to go the other way, too. Click photo for larger image.

Still, nothing stokes the passions of a celebrity-driven culture like a Super Bowl, especially when the Steelers are in it and the cold-weather site is a five-hour drive from home.

Whatever you want to believe about the glitter and the glamour of the job, it was a lot like a regular work week. During the week, you get on an NFL shuttle bus instead of a PAT bus for a 45-minute drive to the media center and set about doing interviews or sift through the glut of information made available.

Things changed around Wednesday and Thursday when the vanguard of the Steeler Nation arrived in Motown.

Jon Kolb, an offensive lineman who won four Super Bowl rings with the Super Steelers, once took a stab at defining the Pittsburgh Steelers. Was it the players? No, they had their time and hung up the pads? Was it the coach? No, he moved on, too. Was it the stadium? No, they replaced it. The one constant, Kolb said, is the fans -- the generations of people who shell out money for season tickets, and more recently seat licenses, or watch religiously from game rooms to bar rooms, from high chairs to wheelchairs, from the South Side to the South Pole.

Every NFL city has passionate football fans, but the Nation represents the Steelers like no other following. It begins before one is born and carries on in the afterlife, as underscored by the hypocycloids of the team logo that get painted on the belly of a pregnant woman and engraved in granite on a tombstone.

Every NFL city has passionate football fans, but the Nation represents the Steelers like no other following. It begins before one is born and carries on in the afterlife, as underscored by the hypocycloids of the team logo that get painted on the belly of a pregnant woman and engraved in granite on a tombstone.

I don't expect anybody else to understand it. I don't know if I can explain it. The Steelers are oxygen to their fans, and vice versa. It's a symbiotic relationship, sometimes rocky but always passionate, particularly when they win. There is a bond stronger than steel between a team and a parochial, provincial place that holds dear the values of hard work, family, sacrifice, dedication and perseverance in the face of adversity, not to mention the undying desire for a chance to form a conga line behind a victory parade.

The Super Bowl is about corporate opulence and glitzy parties. As far as ticket availability is concerned, it's essentially beyond the reach of the common fan. But the Nation reclaimed it this year, even if it overwhelmed the host city.

Detroit did everything it could to accommodate its visitors, and officials said they were used to handling large crowds like they do at the annual auto show and like baseball's All-Star Game last summer.

But, on the Saturday before the game, with a steady rain turning into snow, some fans had to wait two hours to catch the People Mover -- Detroit's elevated transport. Others stood for hours waiting on shuttle buses. Others were turned away by overcrowded casinos, and some discovered that bars ran out of their normal stock of liquor by 9 a.m.

Inconvenience and costs aside, most of the 68,206 seats at Ford Field were not occupied by the corporate crowd or the glitterati. From the perspective of the auxiliary press box in the end zone, it felt more like a home game, right down to the booing of Tom Brady before the coin flip.

	John Beale, Post-Gazette The Jobe Funeral Home sign in Monroeville offers a unique message for the Super Bowl. Click photo for larger image.

For those who consider themselves purists, and you know who you are, the quality of play was hardly super. The Steelers made more mistakes and gained fewer yards, but they made enough big plays on both sides of the ball to win. The Seahawks were penalized more and scored only one touchdown, that one coming off an interception.

The Super Bowl is pass/fail. Since when did they start grading it on style points? Super Bowl IX was 2-0 at halftime and won't ever be mentioned as a classic, but it was the first NFL title for the Steelers and looks just like the fifth one -- sterling silver.

Even if the game wasn't one for the ages, the accomplishment was. No team had won three playoff games on the road and brought home the trophy. So what if Ben Roethlisberger had the lowest quarterback rating on a winning Super Bowl team? His ratings were improved when he appeared on Letterman and the Grammys, didn't they?

The Seahawks should be congratulated on a marvelous season, even if they also played poorly in the big game. In Detroit, their badly outnumbered fans did themselves and their team proud. If anyone can testify that the sting of losing is more intense and longer lasting than the euphoria of winning, it's us. We've had more practice.

Did the best team win? I don't know. But the team that wanted it the most, and the fans that wanted it most, claimed the prize. Nobody asked me, but the outcome would be the same if the Steelers and Seahawks played again tomorrow in a parking lot in Pago Pago, without referees and without TV. And Steelers fans would still outnumber their counterparts by 10-to-1, even if they had to swim to get there.

I thought about parades through the ages and the beauty of the city, which back in the day when steel was king, was once described as hell with the lid off. I walked along as far as Grant Street and looked into the sea of fans along Fifth Avenue, which is due for its makevover soon.

According to the sour grapes e-mail originating in the Pacific Northwest, fueled by some nattering nabobs in the national media, the fix was in and the Seahawks were jobbed. Yeah, right. Show me a sore loser, and I'll show you a loser. Griping about the officiating is the oldest excuse in the book, and losers make excuses. Get over it. Deal with it. End it. Move on. Call Frazier Crane. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. Being angry and bitter is like sitting in a rocking chair. It's something to do, but it won't get you anywhere. The score won't change: Steelers XXI, Seahawks X.

I have no doubt the outcry would have been a hundred times greater if the shoe were on the other foot. I was born at night, but it wasn't last night. Just don't gripe to me about officiating, not after the Indianapolis game or the time in a playoff past when the Steelers were eliminated by a roughing-the-kicker penalty in Tennessee. If people want to remedy the officiating, I'm all for it. Why not also eliminate the endless stoppages for commercials or scale back on the halftime show? Those things have no bearing on the quality of play? And if the national media is looking for a cause, why not look into the Katrina recovery or ask why NORAD can provide air supremacy for a Super Bowl but our sons and daughters are still getting blown up in Iraq. It would keep Woody and Skip from melting down on The Stupidest Damn Sports Show Ever, or whatever it is they do.

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue gave the trophy to Dan Rooney, who gave it to Bill Cowher, who handed it back to Rooney, who gave it to The Bus, who, in turn, shared it with the fans. If another city wanted it, they should have played better.

On the morning of the parade, fresh back from the traffic jams that made the Ohio Turnpike look like the parking lot at the Monroeville Mall, I went to the starting point at the Mellon Arena.

Jerome Bettis was in the final car, signing autographs for a cop and shaking hands with fans. Hines Ward looked like a centaur, the upper half of his torso extending from the body of the Cadillac Escalade he won as Super Bowl MVP. Mr. and Mrs. Bus rode in front of him in a Chevy Avalanche, watching their son carry the ball one last time through Pittsburgh. A high school band from a white-bread suburb played the Steelers' polka.

As the procession advanced, fans along the sidewalk fell in and walked along. Discarded posters littered the pavement along with some souvenirs left behind by the police horses.

Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Question: Was she impressed? Steelers fan R.J. Kurey of Atlanta took Donna Johnson, left, on their first date to Super Bowl XL in Detroit. They flew into Pittsburgh and bought Primanti's sandwiches and then drove on to Detroit. If that isn't the start of a beautiful friendship, what is? Click photo for larger image.

I thought about parades through the ages and the beauty of the city, which back in the day when steel was king, was once described as hell with the lid off. I walked along as far as Grant Street and looked into the sea of fans along Fifth Avenue, which is due for its makeover soon.

In Market Square, I sipped a Starbucks coffee. It never tasted better. I thought about my daughters, now grown and married, who had to look back in the family album to jog their memories about Super Bowls. I thought about my 2-year-old granddaughter who won't remember this one. But if she's lucky, she'll have one for her own generation someday. You have to take time to smell the roses. Then, I was back at work.

Wednesday, I walked the parade route again. It took maybe 15 minutes to cover the 1.2-mile route that the Steelers in their chariots needed two hours to complete. It was blustery and snowy, and you could have shot a cannon off on Fifth Avenue and not hit anybody.

And for some silly reason, I remembered that jackass from The Denver Post who, before the Broncos got beat by the Steelers in Denver, visited here for a slice of Pittsburgh story. He wrote that the city was "butt ugly" and gloomy in the winter.

I wonder how he likes us now.