2008 Woodie Awards
CHAMPIONS
Team takes tough road to success
By Alan Robinson / AP Sports Writer
Issue date: 2/10/06 Section: Sports
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Maybe this is what was needed to bring out the best in a team that often was among the NFL's top teams, but never played like it when it counted most: the toughest road to a Super Bowl championship.
No team had ever won three road playoff games and then the Super Bowl, much less by beating the top three teams in its conference and the best from the opposing conference. Making the challenge even greater, the Steelers had to win each of its final four regular-season games in order to reach the playoffs.
"It feels so much better to do something people say you can't do," linebacker Joey Porter said after the team won its first Super Bowl in 26 years, defeating the Seattle Seahawks 21-10 Sunday night. "There's no better feeling than that. We will always be remembered for the way we did it."
After going from 15-1 a year ago to an underachieving 11-5 during a regular season marked by injuries, and a three-game losing streak, the Steelers fit a career's worth of highlights into a month's worth of playoffs.
By doing so, those four AFC championship game losses and one Super Bowl defeat since January 1995 finally began to fade into the past, along with the perception the Steelers and coach Cowher couldn't win the big one.
Even Terry Bradshaw, Joe Greene, Franco Harris and Lynn Swann, stars of the Steelers' four Super Bowl champions of the 1970s, never put together anything like the most recent championship run.
The Steelers rallied from 10 points down to win at Cincinnati, helped by an early injury to Bengals star quarterback Carson Palmer. The team beat Super Bowl favorite Indianapolis, 21-18 in a stunning upset that will be long remembered for Jerome Bettis' late-game fumble that nearly turned a certain victory into a historic defeat, and the Roethlisberger tackle that made certain it didn't end that way.
That victory carried the Steelers to a 34-17 AFC championship game win at Denver. Then, after a bye week that drained some of the team's momentum after it won seven games in a row, it was able to shake off Roethlisberger's first poor game in two months and a sluggish start to beat the Seahawks.
