By GENE COLLIER, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For the time being, this is Larry Fitzgerald's Super Bowl.
The superb Arizona Cardinals receiver will beat you or he won't.
It's pretty much up to him, with all possible respect to the relevant forces the Steelers will deploy to alter his intentions.

With the whispering humility of his authentic locker room persona, Steelers safety Troy Polamalu devoted part of an allegedly normal Wednesday discussing the generally abnormal circumstance of another Super Bowl coming around just three years after his first.

The thousands of man-hours devoted to game-planning for the Baltimore Ravens in these NFL playoffs haven't exactly been the defining illustration of time well spent.

The Baltimore Ravens absorbed a live, intensely personal demonstration of Pittsburgh Steelers capabilities less than a month ago, in a game that produced one touchdown by both teams over 60 blunt-force minutes, but the Steelers team now on display in Baltimore's updated video library is something quite different.

When its gates opened in 2001, Heinz Field generated no unusual atmospherics, no portent other than what the place merely figured to be. As the lair of typically inhospitable Pittsburgh Steelers defenses, it loomed as a very difficult place for teams to win, particularly in January.
Which it has been -- for the Steelers.

Not to be smug about it or anything, but I had no doubt the Pittsburgh Steelers could go 92 desperate yards against the Baltimore Ravens' defense.
None.
I just thought it might take 92 plays.
Spread over two seasons.

Some caution has been exercised this week in avoidance of the B word, at least until tackle Max Starks responded to a question with a blitz of blurted B's -- three times in two minutes, unofficially -- just before Wednesday's spirited Pittsburgh Steelers practice.

Without having to deploy any of his rhetorical sub packages -- such as mentioning that the man's girlfriend is on the cover of the December Cosmo -- Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin still had a bunch of admiring things to say about Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo.
For additional information, however, you may wish to visit your nearest newsstand or check-out aisle.

By design, by execution, and by earned reputation, the Indianapolis Colts operate well beyond the shadowy margins of football games or seasons. Tony Dungy's team is a big-play, big-production, big-margin enterprise, powered by the genius of Peyton Manning, who later this season will become the only NFL quarterback with nine 4,000-yard autumns.

No one can explain with full authority why "The Express," the new biopic of doomed Syracuse football legend Ernie Davis, underperformed so badly at American box offices on the weekend.