Shot of reality

He is the Pittsburgh Steelers' biggest fan -- and as a man who stands 6-foot-6 and is thicker than some NFL linemen, my buddy Vic Tafur is one of the few Oakland residents who can openly root for his favorite team when it visits the Coliseum and have a prayer of not getting his butt kicked.

But my friend who bleeds black and gold was feeling mighty blue the other day when I brought up his favorite team, seeing as how he's still bummed out about that field-goal attempt on fourth-and-goal from the 2 early in the fourth quarter of the AFC Championship game and the uninspired two-and-a-half months that have followed in Steeltown.

"They lose Plaxico Burress and sign Cedrick Wilson to replace him?" Tafur asked incredulously. "That's a real confidence-booster."

I hated to see him so down. After all, this was a team that followed a 6-10 campaign in 2003 by becoming the first-ever AFC team to go 15-1. Eleven weeks ago I was getting ready to write a heartwarming article on the remarkable 2004 Steelers -- how they bonded amid adversity, rallied around a rookie quarterback and fought their way back to the Super Bowl. Alas, as with many of the AFC title games I've covered in Pittsburgh, the action on the field compelled me to leave some of my best material, gathered in pregame conversations with the home team, in the old notebook.

Yet while Tom Brady's resilient effort after being bedridden with a 103-degree fever was the focus of the piece that ran in Sports Illustrated, the notebook in question still exists. So, in an effort to cheer up my buddy, I offer an abridged version of that lost Steelers story, the idea being that come this fall, Bill Cowher's players will find a way to build on the camaraderie they forged throughout 2004.

OK, here goes:

It was a dark and stormy night ...

I'm not kidding -- that really is how our story begins. I'll let wideout Hines Ward tell it: "They were evacuating the Miami area, and while everyone was leaving we were flying in from Pittsburgh. The storm was knocking us around pretty good, and we were up in the plane thinking, 'If we're gonna go down, we're gonna go down together.' As we were coming down, we could hear the wind and the rain gushing up against the window. It was eerie, man."

This was last Sept. 25, as Hurricane Jeanne was pounding South Florida. It was a Saturday night, and after finishing up a team meeting at their Ft. Lauderdale hotel, the Steelers were hanging out on the eighth floor when the power went out. "Nobody could watch TV or anything," linebacker Joey Porter recalls. "The coaches gave us like 20 flashlights, and we all went out in the hall and shot the s---. It was like a campfire or something -- we sat there and told stories about everything and just talked about life."

As with most NFL teams in this era of pronounced turnover, many of the Steelers were still getting to know one another. They had lost their quarterback, Tommy Maddox, to a serious elbow injury the previous week, meaning first-round pick Ben Roethlisberger had been thrown into the lineup much earlier than planned. That, in and of itself, was a bonding mechanism. Cowher and his assistant coaches had already made a commitment to re-establishing the power running attack that had been missing in '03, with free-agent signee Duce Staley and veteran Jerome Bettis sharing the load at halfback. Now, by Cowher's recollection, "Everyone said to each other, 'Let's not put it on a rookie quarterback. We all have to pick up our game.' We united, because that's what our football team had to do."