Ben Roethlisberger dumped Cincinnati’s school books for 20 years. He was the guy punching your fourth-grade arm, snaking your prom date and waiting for you at your new car in the parking lot, admiring the key-job he’d just done while wondering how that possibly could have happened.
Ben walked into our sports lives in 2001, as a freshman quarterback at Miami University. We haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since. The RedHawks were 3-0 against UC in the Ben Era. He threw for almost 900 yards and five touchdowns. He was a Ben among boys.
The Cincinnati Bengals weren’t great between 2003 and today, but they weren’t terrible, either.