Indianapolis – The thinking around the NFL – particularly about what might have been best for residents in the Rockies, folks whose psyches had been battered by recent postseason meetings – was that a Broncos encounter with the Indianapolis Colts in Sunday’s AFC championship game was something to be avoided at all costs.
The theory seemed particularly true in a season in which the Colts won their opening 13 games and held the home-field advantage throughout the conference playoffs.
Of course, there was one great flaw in the conjecture.
For Denver to avoid Indianapolis, another team would have to beat the Colts. And given the No. 1 seed’s dominant play for most of the season, the team doing the upsetting would have to be pretty good.
So in the spirit of “be careful what you ask for,” we give you the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The second-place team in the AFC North and the No. 6 seed when these proceedings started, Pittsburgh was decidedly better than pretty good for most of Sunday at the RCA Dome, advancing to a date against the Broncos via a 21-18 victory.
The first No. 6 seed to reach a conference championship game, the Steelers will try to hit the trifecta at Invesco Field at Mile High on Sunday for a berth in Super Bowl XL.
Given their success on the road this postseason, the Steelers don’t seem overly concerned about packing their bags once again.
“That’s where we play our best football,” Steelers safety Chris Hope said. “Over the last couple of years we’ve played our best, been the most focused, on the road. I don’t know what it’s about. We like the challenge, we like the idea of going in and taking the crowd out of the game.
“We like being the underdog, we like to play with the pressure on us.”
You know it’s a bad sign when the public address system has to play the theme from “Rocky” to try to rally the troops, as happened late in the third quarter. At that point it seemed like the boxing chestnut was accurate in only one sense – if the contest were a fight it would have been stopped, so thorough was the beating the Steelers inflicted, going ahead 14-0 in the opening 12 minutes.
But the Colts managed to lift themselves off the canvas. All seemed lost when quarterback Peyton Manning was sacked attempting a fourth-down pass from his 2-yard line with 1:27 to play. However, Jerome Bettis lost a fumble for the first time this season, dropping the ball near the goal line. It was returned by Indianapolis cornerback Nick Harper to the Colts’ 42, where Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger made a saving tackle.
Four plays later, with 21 seconds remaining, the ball was at the Steelers’ 28, and Colts kicker Mike Vanderjagt trotted onto the field. Vanderjagt came into the game as the most accurate kicker in NFL history, making 87.5 percent of his attempts. That’s one of the reasons his self-bestowed nickname is “Money.” However, this particular effort was counterfeit, wide right and not close to going through the uprights.
“He hasn’t missed very many big kicks since I’ve been here,” Indianapolis coach Tony Dungy said. “I know he’s very disappointed, but that wasn’t the play that lost the game for us. We had many opportunities to get points and score.”
The star-crossed Colts, the NFL Romeo unable to find happiness ever after with sweet Juliet – a.k.a., the Vince Lombardi Trophy – were once again left to ponder what went wrong. With the home-field advantage, without the New England Patriots to block their path, and potentially facing a Denver team it had beaten in the playoffs by a combined 56 points the past two years, the planets seemed to be aligned their way this season.
“It did seem like that,” tight end Dallas Clark said. “But we didn’t take care of our own business.”
This time, the culprit seemed to be an inability to recapture the mojo that imbued the team’s early-season success. It took a last-second, goal-line stand against the Arizona Cardinals to keep Indianapolis from entering the playoffs on a three-game losing streak. There was also the potential emotional tumult from the Dec. 22 death of James Dungy, the coach’s son.
“We don’t have any excuses for what happened,” safety Bob Sanders said. “You can’t expect to win when you don’t start fast and finish strong. I think we finished strong, did some good things, but we didn’t show up in the first quarter.”
Staff writer Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-820-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
