BALTIMORE -- It was Hollywood that first contended Baltimore football fans were crazy. In "Diner," a movie set here during the late 1950s, a man is so rabid about football that he will not marry his girlfriend unless she passes a trivia test on Colts' history.
How good a life partner could she be, he reasoned, if she did not know that his favorite football team's original colors were green and gray?
The Colts left town almost 18 years ago, but football fanatics remain as much a part of Baltimore as crab cakes and Fort McHenry.
Today, their obsession is the Ravens, who visit Pittsburgh on Sunday for a divisional playoff game with the Steelers.
Tom Valenti, a mild-mannered employee of Baltimore Gas & Electric Co., has been obsessing about the Steelers for months, long before most regarded the Pittsburgh team as a championship contender. He remembered how his competitive juices started flowing when his daughter, a student at a Maryland art institute, brought a new classmate home for dinner.
"Turned out that she was from Pittsburgh," Valenti said. "I asked her if she was a Steelers' fan and she said, no, she didn't care about football. I told her that was good, because if she had, I would have asked her to leave. Nothing personal, of course."
Valenti is no callous host, but his passion for the Ravens and dislike for the Steelers are real.
"There's more energy around the Steelers games than any others, including the Browns. It's fun to have a rival," he said.
His beloved Ravens used to be the Cleveland Browns. Then team owner Art Modell, eager to fatten his bank account in a city that would supply him with a new stadium, moved the club to Baltimore in 1996. Fans renamed the team Ravens, after the poem by Baltimore's Edgar Allan Poe.
Followers of Poe's eerie short stories and poems will gather Saturday night in Baltimore to mark his 193rd birthday. The diehards will drink apple cider at Poe's grave, just the type of devotion that Ravens fans plan to exhibit for the next day's game, though their choice of beverages may be stronger.
Debbie Hossler identifies her hometown as Westminster, Md., notable, she says, because it is "one mile from the Ravens training camp."
She likes to venture there on unbearable summer afternoons to watch her team practice.
"I was there the day Jamal Lewis got hurt," she said, remembering the knee injury that knocked out the Ravens' star running back for the season. "I think it was 117 degrees."
The government that paid so handsomely to acquire the Ravens -- the team's stadium cost $220 million -- has been using football to tout other aspects of Baltimore.
During last year's Super Bowl run, five public relations companies donated their services to Mayor Martin O'Malley, a politician about whom the national press suddenly became curious. O'Malley, 39, turned every discussion about the Ravens into an opportunity to hail Baltimore as "the comeback city."
He would like to do it again. His administration last night illuminated City Hall with purple lights in tribute to the Ravens. The farther they go in the playoffs, the more politicking O'Malley will get to do on the national stage.
Against O'Malley's Purple Reign, the Steelers have a notable Baltimore following. The Pittsburgh booster club here numbers about 2,500, one of the largest in the country.
Elverson Brown, a Fox Chapel native who moved to Baltimore three years ago, is one of the card-carrying Steelers supporters.
"I was number 2,035 when I joined the Steelers booster club here," said Brown, a financial analyst for a Downtown firm. "Most of the Ravens' fans don't like Pittsburgh. I think it comes down to jealousy on their part, and the arrogance of Steelers' fans," who, in the beginning, did not consider the Ravens a worthy rival.
Mike Klingensmith, a police officer in a town outside Baltimore, is a Steelers season-ticket holder. He has no use for the Ravens' fans or players.
"It seems like they always have something to prove. All the loudmouths on the Ravens team have turned a lot of people off," he said.
A win by the Ravens on Sunday would make life miserable for Klingensmith, who displays a Steelers helmet in his house.
Valenti, the utility worker from Baltimore, expects lots of suffering in Pittsburgh after the game.
When a reporter asked him how to spell his name, Valenti began by saying "V, as in victory."
Ravens rooter Hossler was just as confident that the Steelers are about to go down.
"The road to the Super Bowl," she said, "will contain a stop in Pittsburgh -- a visit."
Baltimore fans may say it's not personal, but it is 
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