The two most beautiful words in the English language: Wide right.

Yesterday, the Pittsburgh Steelers torn out my heart and my guts and left them splattered all over a dorm room floor somewhere in Mid-Michigan. They left me shaken, shocked, nervous and absolutely, purely elated. For what seems like the millionth time in the 20 years that I've been a Steeler fan, they're going to the AFC championship game.

The first chance at missed glory I can recall came on my father's 39th birthday, in 1995 against the San Diego Chargers. After the slaughter, my family and I sad in a dark, sad restaraunt, haunted with waitresses in their black and gold, sporting faces of false happiness. The bar was deserted, an air of hopelessness and doom hung somewhere just above our heads and just below the haze of cigarette smoke. I was nine.

That year, I watched the 49ers descimate the Chargers. I saw Montana and Rice in the confetti and flashbulbs. I saw some hulking linebacker holding his daughter screaming "We're going to Disney World!" That's the first time I really grasped what it means to win a Superbowl.

The Pittsburgh Steelers have four SuperBowl rings. The last came in 1980, almost seven years before I was born.

The next year, 1996, the year of Superbowl 40 was the year I learned at some base level about what it meant to be a Steeler fan. I come from a family of wildly temperamental sports fans, led by my father, who will storm out out of a room, take a walk, drive his John Deere around the backyard in the middle of the night (That one happened when the Pirates dropped game seven of the NL championship against the Braves in '92. He'll still curse the name of Sid Bream vehemently to this day. He was OUT, goddammit.) My mother is a relatively calm fan during the regular season, but come playoff time, she is that rabid Pittsburgh woman, screaming, wearing her black and gold Mardi Gras beads, clutching the rosary of her Terrible Towel to her chest.

She was born and bred in Pittsburgh, a product of the city and the school system, and everything I learned about being a part of the Steeler Nation came from her side of the family. When I was 10, I learned what it was to twist a towel through 4th and inches, to curse inept safties who blew their coverage, to scream and howl through close, close, close final minutes of a fourth quarter.

I remember that year's championship game against the Colts probably more vividly than anything from my early childhood. We were celebrating my father's 40th on the day of the game. The fourth quarter lasted an eternity. Gregg Lloyd, the aggressive, jacked linebacking machine that he was, praying atop a Terrible Towel on the sidelines When that final Hail Mary was launched through the air, I went through 30 seconds of blind terror before it was swatted to the ground in the endzone.

And then...Cowher was hoisting that AFC Championship trophy in the air, the iron jaw gone, all smiles. He'd finally gotten there.

In the promised land of Tempe, the Dallas Cowboys sauntered out of their little tunnel onto the field with a swagger and cool confidence that boiled my little-girl blood.Remember, these were the mid-90s Cowboys, the Aikman-Irvin, Jimmy Johnson Cowboys, the embodiment of pure evil and purebred football perfection. The Steelers, on the other hand, charged down that white vault, bouncing off its sides like pinballs, slamming helments, bashing shoulder pads. That forever defined my vision of the Steelers — passion, heart, cohones . No star power, not a well oiled machine of marketing and slick proccessed image, not Michael Irvin in his thousand dollar suits, not the most massive offensive line ever put together. Just Neil, some crazy kid we liked to call "Slash" and a running back named Bam and several of the most fierce linebackers 90s football ever saw. (Really, Lloyd was pure defensive poetry in motion. Forget Chuck Norris jokes. Greg Lloyd's tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.)

Three times that night, Neil O'Donnell broke my heart in the waning Arizona sun. Despite Cowher's onside kick brilliance, despite everything my Steelers did to unseat those unholy Texan monsters, when your QB throws three ridiculous interceptions, directly to the same safety, there's no amount of heart that can get you out of the hole he's dug. I didn't know what had just happened. That was my first introduction to blinding disappointment.

I learned the Steeler fan's mantra: There's always next year.

For the past ten years, I've learned. I learned about the glory days, the rings, the Immaculate Reception. I learned about the game, about our weak secondary and indominatable line. I learned to be able to curse and swear at the screen, through years of Kordell, through the loss to the Broncos in '97, through the rebuilding years, to the 2000 and 2001 seasons when the God awful New England Patriots came to my town and again, boiled my blood-this time not with their arrogant confidence, but with their terrible luck and the leg of the world's most clutch fieldgoal kicker. See also-2005.

But yesterday, on my father's 50th birthday, far from the Steeler faithful, the black and gold marched in the hated and reverred RCA Dome and stumbled out with a win. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just a win. A shot at a continued season. Something to bring me another week of Steeler football. And really, I can't ask for anything more from the team who's brought me so much elation and so much misery for the past eleven years.

I heard that when it looked like it was over-when Harper was streaking towards the endzone, my 13 and 16-year-old brothers both stormed out of the room. They never even saw Big Ben stretch and grab with infinite hope for his season, hinged on the ankle of a DB who'd been stabbed in the leg 24 hours prior.

The cycle goes on. Someday, my brothers will drive tractors in their backyards after the much maligned city that made them has let them down. I will dress my children in black and gold and take them to Heinz Field and I'll take them to the statue of Jerome Bettis outside and say "Mommy was here the day this man stopped play because the crowd was chanting his name. The thought of his leaving the city brought some 65,000 people to their feet." I'll teach them about the glory days and how to spot a blitz and how to be able to understand the game that I love so much.

I don't know if that was Jerome's last game. I don't know if the black and gold will make it to a city, much like the one they came from, that's only an hour away from where I now live my life. What I do know is that yesterday, they played a game that will go down in history books and highlight reels.

When this week is over, when all the talking heads and athletic pundits have finished running their mouths, there will be just one thing. Two things actually-a winner and a loser. Someone going to Detroit and someone who's not.

Regardless of who is who, I do know one thing. Pittsburgh will still ring and will always ring with one of the greatest sounds that can errupt from a crowd of people.

"Here we go Steelers, here we go..."