While there often tends to be a gradual—or perhaps sudden—shift in the prevailing opinion about players when they leave your team (“he was never that good anyway”), the loss of cornerback Mike Hilton in free agency seems to be one that a lot of Pittsburgh Steelers fans are still feeling.
It helps that he also sort of embodied a lot of the qualities that are often attributed to Pittsburgh, as a football team and as an organization, a hard-working overachiever and all of that good stuff. You can see it on the field when he plays. Another former Steelers cornerback, Ike Taylor, he’s seen it, too, and he had some thoughts on his leaving.