Pittsburgh – The Godlewskis plan to wait at the airport today for standby flights to Denver – Susan, her husband and her children, along with Susan’s sister and her family – eight in all. If they don’t get a flight, they’ll try again Friday. If not then, Saturday. Or Sunday morning maybe.
Because they have to see the Steelers play the Broncos.
“We’ve been fans forever,” Susan Godlewski said.
The black and gold is everywhere: Welcome to Blitzburgh.
This gritty melting pot, this big-hearted, blue-collar city is enraptured, tantalized by the thought that the beloved Steelers could return to the Super Bowl. All the team has to do is win one more game in some strange mile-high city in the mountains, fans say. Some outpost where everyone has it easy and skis.
“We’re going to hammer the Orange Crush can,” said Jim Coen, as he held up one of the black-and-gold Steelers hammers he was selling for $20.
In the 10 years he has owned J&J Novelties in Pittsburgh’s historic Strip District – blocks of shops filled with foodstuffs and curios from seemingly every ethnic group on the planet – the Steelers have made it to the playoffs four times.
But with no trips to the Super Bowl so far, the tons of black- and-gold goodies Coen stocks have added up to a wash. “So I really need a win,” he said.
Fans started lining up at noon Wednesday outside Heinz Field, the Steelers’ glitzy modern redoubt down the way from the site of the former Three Rivers Stadium, that historic old giant concrete ashtray that served the team through four Super Bowl- winning seasons.
Like the old steel mills, Three Rivers has been demolished and carted away.
The die-hards waited all day as snow fell from a gray sky and wind whipped through their black-and-gold blankets, jerseys and Terrible Towels.
They waited for the Bus – hugely popular running back Jerome Bettis – to tape his regular television show. But this taping would serve as a kind of pre- pep-rally pep rally, and the line to get in stretched the length of the stadium.
“I have black-and-gold blood in my veins,” said Jan Hickman, near the front of the line.
For so many here, Steelermania is nearly a religion. Hickman remembers how her grandfather bought all the women in her family black-and gold corsages for church before Steelers Super Bowls.
For tens of thousands every fall, the Sunday ritual is church and/or tailgating and then, of course, the game.
Pittsburgh’s gigantic steel mills fell on hard times in the 1980s and were gone by 1990. So, in some ways, the football team that symbolizes the city’s former power and identity continues to carry that weight.
“The mills used to be the backbone of the town. You might as well fall back on them,” said Brian Beakley, 30.
And though the city has managed to cobble together a diversified set of employers and built office parks and shopping malls in the ashes of its mills, Pittsburgh loses population in every new census. A few hundred thousand people left the region after the mills closed, and other big corporate names followed.
But only one local family, the Rooneys, has owned the Steelers since 1933, when they were one of the founding members of the NFL. And they keep their coaches for years.
It gives folks here a sense of permanence, said Dave Zemba, who operates the Monongahela Incline, one of the cable cars that rises up Mount Washington, a long bluff overlooking the city.
“It’s an old-time tradition,” Zemba said. “Like this incline. It’s been here since the 1870s. And the Steelers – you never have to worry about them leaving.”
Staff writer Chuck Plunkett can be reached at 303-820-1333 or cplunkett@denverpost.com.
