Thanks to the semi-mythic phenomenon known as home field advantage, Pittsburgh was ground zero for last weekend’s Steelers playoff disaster, but the fallout went global in undiluted toxicity.
There are Steelers bars in France, after all, so the face-melting anger that descended on saloons and family rooms up and down all three rivers was perfectly mirrored in thousands of distant places, anywhere a single soul attends the church of the black and gold.
One such outpost is South Portland, Maine, idyllically situated among painfully charming lighthouses and rocky coastlines a couple hours north of Foxborough, the intended dateline for this column in partial fulfillment of Mike Tomlin’s November pronouncement to Tony Dungy: “We should win it all.