Regardless of its football outcome, and regardless of any potentially extraordinary circumstance leading directly or indirectly thereto, this Steelers game on September's final weekend in 2009 will be unlike any in more than half of a century.

Historically it might fail to qualify as special or even unusual or even very noteworthy in any other way, but the Steelers game today will not count among its eyewitnesses one Daniel M. Rooney.

"It's all right," Rooney said in his office before returning to the ambassador's residence in Dublin's Phoenix Park yesterday.

It's all right?

Well yes, I'm sure the Steelers and the Cincinnati Bengals are planning to play it anyway, and the Steelers chairman emeritus will be watching when it comes on in Ireland at 9:15 p.m., but what must that feel like to someone who hasn't missed a black-and-gold kickoff since the day he introduced Chuck Noll on the steps of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993?

And then he missed a mere preseason game. He hasn't missed a real game, "a league game" as he calls it, since when?

"Long time, sometime in the '50s or '60s," he said. "Well it's 50 years, more than 50 years. I was probably in school, that's right, I was in school and the team was on the West Coast."

So let's place it, through a series of loose Inspector Clouseau-type deductions, as Dec. 14, 1952, when Dan was a sophomore at Duquesne University and the Steelers finished their season in Los Angeles, which would make it a couple of months short of 57 years since he missed a "league game."

You're wedded to every single Steelers snap for 57 years, and then you're the Ambassador to Ireland?

No, it's not like that at all, really.

"I'm enjoying it; it's very good; I've thought for some time that it might be time for some other phase in life," he said. "I'm not denigrating football, but this is a bigger job and a bigger job than I thought it was."

He made it home for the opener against Tennessee and was able to take in the soggy outcome in Chicago last week because it bumped up against the week of the G-20 Summit, but now his new life's prioritizing can't be finessed any longer. Like Noll, the man he hired to drag his father's franchise out of the league's backstreets 40 years ago, Dan Rooney is a person of intensely varied interests.

I sometimes wondered, given his interests in politics, world affairs, geo-political issues, religion, art, language, whether Dan ever felt he had undervalued himself in the NFL even as he helped mold the league into a cultural colossus, but he never saw it that way.

"I spent my whole life in football, talking with the league and the commissioners, not just with the Steelers, and when I was coming up, I really felt like being with the Steelers and doing the job right was a very valuable thing, and it was very satisfying, but that didn't mean I didn't have other interests," he said. "Just look now, even in the context of the G-20 this week, you can see what it means for the city, but the Steelers' profile in that is so meaningful. I was walking around [Thursday] and I was talking to the police and the different authorities, and a couple of the local cops were pointing to some police from Chicago, and they said to me, 'Don't talk to those two guys; all they've been doin' is bothering us about that game last week.' So I go over and tell them, 'Hey, we gave that game.' And they laughed and wound up getting their pictures taken with me."

With frantic e-mailers still bemoaning the Steelers' balky running game and at least one calling for the ambassador to be recalled because of that "crisis," Rooney spent part of the week addressing the Atlantic Council at Carnegie Mellon University on issues that seemed to transcend such matters as whether the NFL must endure an uncapped year in 2010.

"As economic recovery is established," said the ambassador, "we need to have in place a new framework that will support healthy and a vibrant global economy. We hope to reach agreement on such a framework in Pittsburgh. The impact of the crisis on workers has been particularly severe. As growth returns, we need to do everything we can to ensure that employment does as well.

"The G-20 should commit to implementing recovery plans that prioritize job growth; income support for the unemployed and the quick regaining of employment. Substantial progress has been made on the commitments made in Washington and London to improve financial supervision and regulation. For example, just in the past 10 years, the economies of the BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- have grown rapidly. That said, their lower GDP per capita shows that they still have room to grow. The most important thing for each and every country -- the United States included -- is to develop a balanced economy, one that creates sustainable growth and provides equal opportunities to its citizens."

So Dan Rooney thumbs his TV on tonight to take in Steelers-Bengals, which isn't exactly going to change the world, then he'll get up tomorrow morning and try to do only that. He'll meet with his assistant, Robert Faucher, and go on about his mission, which now includes planning and adopting themes for community forums in all of Ireland's 32 counties.

"I want to represent the United States to the Irish people, so that they know we still care for them and that they understand that they are among our very special friends," he said. "I want to hear what they have to say and present it to the government of the United States."

Which is not a bad ambition when you're 77 and just getting started. Does he want anything else? Well yes, he would like a Steelers-Bengals score the moment it's final. Preferably with Pittsburgh on top.

Gene Collier's "Two-Minute Warning" videos are featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.