Sports year chock full of highs, lows
PITTSBURGH — It took them 26 years, but the Pittsburgh Steelers finally did it. They won the Super Bowl.
Really.
After so many years of fans yearning for a return to the days when Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris, Jack Ham and Jack Lambert made winning Super Bowls a nearly annual occurrence during the 1970s, the Steelers again traveled the road to the Super Bowl. In many ways.
From Cincinnati to Indianapolis to Denver to Detroit, they won in the postseason like they never could at home. After failing to win the NFL championship in 2004 despite going 15-1, they won a season later with an 11-5 record that nearly left them out of the postseason.
"It was, 'Just tell us where we're going next, just send us off to another team,"' coach Bill Cowher said. "I think the guys thrived on that. With all due respect to Heinz Field, we just kept going off (on the road)."
The Steelers' unexpected Super Bowl triumph — obviously — was the big story in Western Pennsylvania sports in 2006, but there were many other significant moments in many other sports. With so much news crowded into so little time, perhaps a Top 10 list for the year is in order.
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Steelers win the Super Bowl. Accustomed to postseason disappointment after dropping the AFC title game at home during the 1994, 1997, 2001 and 2004 seasons — and the Super Bowl in the 1995 season — the Steelers won a championship like no team ever did.No sixth-seeded team had won three playoff games on the road and the Super Bowl, too. But the Steelers did exactly that by winning at Cincinnati (31-17), Indianapolis (21-18) and Denver (34-17) in successive weeks, then beating Seattle 21-10 in a Super Bowl that was easily their worst played of the four games."The toughest route was the scenic route, and it proved to be the best route for us," linebacker Joey Porter said.How did they do it? Simple. A four-game end-of-season winning streak allowed them to charge into the postseason with the momentum, confidence and consistency they lacked all those times they clinched weeks before the regular season ended.And, for the first time since the Terry Bradshaw days, they had a quarterback — Ben Roethlisberger — who didn't look overwhelmed by the playoffs or by what it took to excel during them.•
Penguins sale and arena. Only a few months after rejoicing over the signing of Russian star-in-waiting Evgeni Malkin, the Penguins were slapped by twin disappointments as December wound down. First, Canadian businessman Jim Balsillie backed out of his $175 million purchase during the very week the deal was to close. Then the state gaming board rejected Isle of Capri Casinos' bid for a Pittsburgh slots license, costing the Penguins the $290 million arena the gaming company promised to build them. A discouraged and disappointed Mario Lemieux then announced he would look to relocate the franchise, though he also said his group would discuss a Plan B arena deal with state and local leaders.•
Cowher's status and Steelers falloff. Not long after the Steelers won the Super Bowl, it was learned that Cowher had bought a retirement home in Raleigh, N.C., and his family planned to live there this season. With Cowher unsigned past 2007, there was considerable speculation he might retire after a disappointing-to-date season in which the Steelers started 2-6.•
Big Ben's crash. The post-Super Bowl celebrating was only winding down — the team had visited the White House only days before — when a helmetless Roethlisberger nearly died during a June 12 motorcycle accident in downtown Pittsburgh.He didn't miss any camp time because of a scary accident in which he lost considerable blood, but he sat out the Sept. 7 opener after undergoing an emergency appendectomy. With so much time spent in a hospital rather than a huddle, it probably wasn't a surprise it took him until midseason to begin playing again like he did in 2004 and 2005.•
Jerome Bettis' fumble and retirement. For a moment, it appeared that the Steelers had been victims of the Anti-Immaculate Reception. They were winding down the clock in the final two minutes of their upset-of-the-year divisional playoff win at Indianapolis when Gary Brackett's helmet hit jarred the ball loose from Bettis near the goal line. Only a shoestring tackle by Roethlisberger on the Colts' Nick Harper prevented a long touchdown return that likely would have created the NFL's most miraculous postseason finish since Franco Harris' out-of-nowhere touchdown catch of a deflected Bradshaw pass against the Raiders in 1972.Bettis got a reprieve when the Colts' Mike Vanderjagt badly missed a tying 46-yard field goal. Later, Bettis — the NFL's No. 5 career rusher — said that if the Steelers had lost in Indianapolis, he might have returned for another season to prevent that fumble from being the final play of his career. Instead, he retired minutes after the Super Bowl ended.n
Malkin joins Crosby. Several months after Sidney Crosby became the first 18-year-old in NHL history to score 102 points in a season, another can't-miss talent joined the Penguins. Malkin, the No. 2 pick in the 2004 draft, fled his Russian team during training camp in Finland and traveled clandestinely to the United States to sign with Pittsburgh. He scored a goal in each of his first six games.•
Pirates host a super All-Star game during another dud of a season. The Pirates did something right during a 14th consecutive losing season: put on a smash of an All-Star game. Unfortunately for them, the come-from-behind 3-2 AL victory decided by Michael Young's RBI triple in the ninth inning proved one of the season's few big moments in PNC Park. They started 1-7 under new manager Jim Tracy and were 30-60 at the All-Star break, forcing them to play above .500 merely to get back to 67-95, the same record they had the season before.•
Freddy Sanchez wins a batting title. One of the Pirates' few bright moments — Freddy Sanchez hit .344 to become a surprise NL batting champion — accentuated a longstanding franchise problem. Again, they badly misgauged a player as Sanchez spent the first month of the season on the bench as a utility infielder, only to win the club's first batting title in 24 years.•
Duquesne shootings. Six months after a school-worst 3-24 record prompted Duquesne to fire basketball coach Danny Nee and hire the energetic Ron Everhart, the normally tranquil campus was rocked in September by the shootings of five players following a school party. Four had arrived only weeks before. Sam Ashaolu, a junior college transfer from Canada, nearly died of head injuries and, at year's end, faced an uncertain basketball future. Top recruit Stuard Baldonado was seriously injured and Division I transfers Shawn James (foot) and Kojo Mensah (arm) were badly hurt. The depleted Dukes unexpectedly won their first two games but, lacking size and healthy players, dropped their next seven.•
Pitt ranked No. 2. With 7-footer Aaron Gray going from sub in 2004-05 to star in 2005-06, Pitt basketball finished the 2005-06 season with a surprisingly good 25-8 record despite losing to Bradley in an NCAA second-round game. With eight of their top 10 players back, the Big East preseason favorites were ranked as high as No. 2 in December before losing to Wisconsin. For coach Jamie Dixon, it was a rewarding but saddening year: His sister, Army women's coach Maggie Dixon, died of a heart problem weeks after the two Dixons became the first brother-sister tandem to take teams to their respective NCAA tournaments in the same year.
