Steeler fandom is a weird and wonderful thing. Sometimes even rational, informed people like Michael Novak can get caught up in a parochial frenzy and start channeling George Swetnam.
Here's what he has to say about Pittsburgh with an "h".
So it's steeltown America on the rise, the rough and the ready, not a rich team but always fighting and always playing smash-mouth, and running hard, and slashing... and I love it that their opponents this year will be wearing the colors of --hard to comprehend this -- Hamas! Couldn't be a better opponent, who will probably be favored. .... Pittsburgh is the city of the Deerslayer, and the American flag, and always the highest casualty rates in American wars ... This is the city where they make steel, the first and the best on any continent. They make steel with white-hot heat, and fire, and rolling mills, in open spaces where men sometimes fell into molten steel, or molten steel spilled on them, and the smell (my old, now dead uncle once told me) was one you never forgot...This is Tough Town U.S.A., tough and vulgar and often mean ... and where people have heart, and don't quit. They don't ask for a break, and don't expect one, because they haven't experienced many. Last quarter, seven minutes to play, and down fourteen points? That's life! ... All of us here are used to it, so lower your head, plow straight on, and be determined not to be stopped, until you win. I love the Pittsburgh spirit. ' Against Adversity' is its middle name. Here they pronounce it 'grit.'Read it here.
I was born and raised in "Pittsylvania Country" and yield to no man and few women in my love for the region, but Michael, you are starting to embarrass us. Tone it down a bit..., please.
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