For a football team that effectively confronts a must-win situation every time it gets into uniform -- and that includes August for some of its neurotic fan base -- Sunday's Steelers appointment with the San Diego Chargers might appear no more urgent than any other, and yet it could end up making a liar of Peyton Manning.

Maybe you missed the Manning Proclamation in the gloaming last Sunday, maybe because it was delivered with no warning, no fanfare and no audible reaction. Mounting the interview platform in a blue suit and brown tie 20 minutes after his three scoring tosses lifted the Indianapolis Colts to a 24-20 victory at Heinz Field, Peyton had no compunction about going deep rhetorically:

"Pittsburgh," he said, "is definitely going to be playing in the postseason."

Definitely.

Ex-squeeze me?

Definitely?

Somehow, the NFL standings keep getting published this week without any of those little tiny letters next to the top shelf of the AFC North. You know, like the little x -- clinched playoffs, or y -- clinched division title, or z -- clinched home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Not even a little p -- definitely in postseason according to Peyton Manning.

On the off chance then that the Steelers' schedule for the other side of December could still look as empty as nuclear winter, let's at least temporarily cast the Chargers as the fulcrum of this 2008 season. Lose to the Chargers, and the road to January swerves onto the shoulder of the bridge to nowhere.

"You can't say that," Hines Ward said after practice yesterday even though I'd just said it, or something like it. "You don't know what other teams are going to do. The year we won the Super Bowl we had to pull out the last four games and we did that. Losing a game to the Indianapolis Colts didn't make us a sorry team overnight. But still, the next two, three weeks, they're crucial."

While the Baltimore Ravens prepare to celebrate their status as AFC North co-leaders by presenting their credentials to the Giants and then the Eagles, the Steelers must examine a perfect opportunity to retake a two-game lead with the help of the Chargers and Bengals. But unlike the Bengals, the Chargers are competent, which makes the next one week more crucial than the next two or three. San Diego's 4-5 record might not be misleading, unless you think it means something that they lost by one point, lost by two, lost by five and lost by seven. On top of that, they've got plenty to play for.

"The bright spot is that we're still in the race for our division," Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers said via conference call yesterday. "We're right there one game back [of Denver] and that's very encouraging considering how we started."

Rivers has delivered 300-yard performances in three of San Diego's past four games, and unless the Steelers' ravaged secondary (Fernando Bryant?) manages to bring his temperature down Sunday, the stretch of schedule that begins after the Bengals leave will take on the aura of impossibility.

Right after Thanksgiving, the Steelers encounter the Patriots, Cowboys, Ravens and the unbeaten Tennessee Titans, all but the Cowboys on the road. So you don't have to look it up, those teams are currently a combined 26-10. Lose Sunday to the Chargers, and you could wake up 7-8 on The Night before Christmas, which could suck plenty of the enchantment from defensive coordinator Dick Le-Beau's annual locker room rendering of the Clement Clarke Moore poem by the same name.

"It's early," Ben Roethlisberger said in his regularly brief Wednesday media feeding. "It's the second half of the season [but] we still have a lot of football to play. We're not 3-6, we're 6-3. There's no reason to panic and there's no room for it. We'll let the fans deal with that, let them do the panicking for us. We're going to keep a level head."

Keeping a level head isn't this club's issue; it's that Ben is keeping a balky shoulder. It wasn't insignificant that the starting quarterback actually practiced yesterday, as he often doesn't feel up to it until late in the week.

"It always helps when you're out there doing stuff and guys can hear your voice and see the ball come out of your hand," Ben said. "I think it'll help a lot."

To whatever extent that's true, the Steelers would figure to see a rebound toward the heady days when Roethlisberger led the NFL in passer rating (mid-September), when he was spoken of in some zip codes as the game's best passer, at least with Tom Brady in rehab. Today, his passer rating is notches below Brady's backup, Matt Cassel, below Tyler Thigpen, below Dan Orlovsky. If you know who either of those guys plays for, I'd be interested, if not terribly so.

"Ben's always responded well in this situation," Ward said. "He took the blame for the Indianapolis game, but he didn't have to. We win and lose as a team. You get a lot of praise and publicity when you're the quarterback and you get a lot of blame too, more than you should a lot of times. We just have to help him respond, by staying on blocks longer, running better routes. Everybody will help him."

So what Hines is saying is don't panic. As Ben says, it's early. But as Yogi Berra once said, approximately, in some places, it gets late early.