Listen up, BITs (that’s Baltimoreans in Training), for the next two weeks you should be walking around with an indescribable glow. I want women on the street to ask you if you’re pregnant. Yes, men, that includes you. You get extra points if they rub your tummy and ask, “When are you due?”
The reason for all this glow and happiness? The Steelers lost the Superbowl. If you’re from Pittsburgh and you refuse to denounce the Steelers, get the eff out of my city. Your kind and non-seafood eaters are not welcome here.
Why am I forcing you to dump on the Steelers and Steelers’s fans? Well, dear reader, the answer is quite simple. We’re football rivals.
Right, that was a bit disingenuous. We’re rivals because the Ravens and the Steelers are historically the top contenders in the AFC North Division. “Historically” meaning for the eight years or so since the division was formed.
Everything would make more sense if you had some context about Baltimore’s tragic football past. Before we had the Ravens, we were the Baltimore Colts. Yes, the Indianapolis Colts once belonged to Baltimore. As most Baltimoreans will tell you, the Colts betrayed and murdered your father.
Oh wait, that’s Darth Vader. However, they did steal away from Baltimore in the middle of the night.
Whether this is true or not is rather irrelevant. The feelings of betrayal and anger are what have endured from that time. When the Colts left, they took Baltimore’s football history with them.
Johnny Unitas, a subject for another column, and all of his achievements were no longer the Baltimore Colts’s achievements, but rather the Indianapolis Colts’s achievements. Let me say this: Johnny Unitas never was nor ever has been an Indianapolis Colt. His records, though, read as such.
After the Colts’s owner, Bob Irsay, made his “Midnight Ride” to Indianapolis, Baltimore was left without a football team for 12 long years. This is where the rivalry with the Steelers begins.
Since Baltimore football fans had no team to root for, they looked to other cities and teams to cheer on. A small number placed their hats in the Steelers’s ring.
For 12 years, this wasn’t a problem. When Art Modell, owner of the Cleveland Browns, pulled a similar move to Bob Irsay and moved his team to Baltimore, football fans had an in-city team to cheer for. Some Baltimore Steelers’s fans did not, however, realign their allegiance. Big mistake.
So this is where we are at: it’s all the Indianapolis Colts’s fault. Although Baltimore’s rivalry with the Steelers can get a little heated and sometimes nasty, on the whole it is still rather pure. Baltimore didn’t wrong the Steelers and the Steelers didn’t wrong the Ravens. They are just the two smartest kids in high school who hate each other because they both want valedictorian. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because that weird communist kid in the back who is obsessed with cheese comes from out of the bleachers and intercepts it, while everyone around him just stands there scratching their heads, asking, “How in the hell did that happen?”
