by Mike Batista

Created on: June 30, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Ever get to a bar 10 minutes before last call?

In the 26 years between their fourth and fifth Super Bowl championships, that's what being a Steelers fan felt like for me.

I became a Steelers fan in 1979 and saw them win their fourth Super Bowl. I didn't know it at the time, but it was closing time for the Steelers' dynasty. There were a couple of after-hours parties when the Steelers went deep into the playoffs with two of the worst teams ever to make the playoffs.

In 1984, they went 9-7 and upset the Broncos in Denver in the divisional round, but they had no chance in hell against Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins in the AFC championship game. It turned out the Dolphins had no chance against the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl. And who was the only team to beat the 15-1 49ers that year? The Steelers. Don't ever forget that, Joe Montana.

Then in 1989, after opening the season with a 51-0 loss at home to the Browns, the Steelers of Bubby Brister, Merrill Hoge and Mike Mularkey somehow went 9-7, upset the Oilers in Houston on New Year's Eve in the wild-card game then lost at Denver by a point. During that off-season, whenever I crossed paths with a stranger in a Steelers hat, we'd start talking about the team. In more than one of those conversations, it was pointed out that if the Steelers had beaten Denver, they surely would have beaten Cleveland in the AFC championship game.

But the 80s were mostly a decade of mediocrity. The bar didn't open up again until 1992, when Bill Cowher was hired.

When the time came to make one of the biggest decisions of my life, which NFL team to swear allegiance to, I was 8 years old. The decision I made would turn me into a mutated New England sports fan. I grew up a hard-core fan of the Red Sox and Celtics (and unlike with the Steelers, I picked the absolute best time to become a Celtics fan) and a Bruins fan pretty much by default since I rarely follow the NHL.

And then there's the Steelers.

In the schoolyards of New England in 1979, boys who liked football wore those knitted winter hats with the pom-poms on top. The ones who didn't wear Patriots hats wore either Steelers or Cowboys hats.

I had read somewhere that the Steelers were unbeaten, but strangely enough, it was largely two losses that hooked me on the Steelers. They had won their third Super Bowl the season before and started the 1979 season 4-0. Then one Sunday afternoon, a Steelers game at Philadelphia just happened to be on TV. It would be years before it was do-or-die

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