"We won."
David DeCastro scissored off the tattered tape from his ankles, his wrists and wherever else NFL athletes try in vain to spare their bodies. He sat at his stall bruised. At the next stall, Marcus Gilbert was a bit bloodied. At the next, Ramon Foster could barely budge.
If the Steelers' locker room at Heinz Field were a MASH unit, the farthest corner from the entrance, the one that houses the offensive line, would be triage.
"Yeah," DeCastro came back when I brought that up. "But we won. That's all that matters."
They did: Steelers 38, Raiders 35.
And the big man was right: That was all that seemed to matter on this Sunday afternoon.
This game was ridiculous. Its storyline was so cluttered with so many clusters of the completely unpredictable that it's hard to know where to start in describing it. The franchise quarterback was felled for a second time this season, Ben Roethlisberger's left foot was sprained to force a fourth-quarter exit, and somehow even that could got lost in all the other potentially sensational headlines that surrounded it.
Seriously, take your pick:
• Antonio Brown had a historic performance with 17 catches for 284 yards, including a game-sealing 57-yarder in the final minute, but also a horrible muffed punt.
• Roethlisberger had pinpoint accuracy most of the afternoon but bungled near the end with an ugly third-quarter interception, as he did against the Bengals the previous week, only to bounce back with touchdown passes on his next two drives.
• Landry Jones, not so long ago a career clipboard holder, replaced Roethlisberger and, rather than setting off sirens around the Nation, coolly completed 4 of 6 passes for 79 yards and the bomb to Brown. And when I say coolly, I'm partially referencing this little exchange ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mCT0m-UMhk
• The loss of Le'Veon Bell was supposed to devastate the offense, but all DeAngelo Williams delivered in his first game as the for-real No. 1 back was 170 yards on 27 rushes, 55 more yards on two catches, two touchdowns and at least one pancake-level block.
• Chris Boswell missed his first NFL kick after weeks of perfection at the worst time, then followed that with a botched kickoff, only to win the game with a 19-yarder.
And if all that isn't enough, there's also a side platter of Ross Cockrell picking off Derek Carr in the end zone to thwart what could have been a critical Oakland score, or Bud Dupree blocking a late punt, or Roosevelt Nix forcing a late fumble on an Oakland kickoff return, or Glassport-born and Penn State-raised tight end Jesse James making a dynamic NFL debut, or even the simple math involved in the Steelers setting down another AFC opponent that's in the wild card mix.
As DeCastro observed, it's all that matters.
Or maybe it isn't. Because I liked this line, too, from Brown: "The most important thing is that we're a team at the end of the day."
These Steelers might not be outright cursed, but they've been challenged. Maurkice Pouncey and Shaun Suisham were lost in the preseason. Bell and Martavis Bryant missed six combined games to NFL suspensions, then Bell was lost for the whole thing. Then Kelvin Beachum. Roethlisberger went down once for a month and now again for some undetermined amount of time, maybe a few weeks.
And yet, they're 5-4 and hold one of the two wild cards, along with the Jets.
They're still in there.
They're at least part of the way toward writing a script that sees an NFL team qualify for the playoffs with half a season of Jones and/or Michael Vick at quarterback.
Am I the only one that sees this as outrageously impressive?
In the event that I might be, I touched base with Darrius Heyward-Bey, sort of my Zen master with this team. DHB always has his pulse on both sides of the ball, on and off the field, strategically and spiritually, and I was sure he'd offer some wisdom to support this.
His initial response: "We're just killin' it, man. We are."
Oh, my.
"No, really, look at what's happening out there. We have people going down with injuries or whatnot, but we're still doing the jobs required of us. And we're doing it by being physical. All of us. Not just the secondary and all the big hits you see. It's us guys on offense, too. And special teams. We are killin' it."
OK, so maybe Zen wasn't the right term. But you get it.
And if you don't ...
That's Williams' first touchdown up there. That's a clearance the size of the Fort Pitt Tunnel, thanks to DeCastro and Gilbert, both of whom push so authoritatively that they're running into the end zone right alongside the guy they're escorting.
"The O-line did a great job," Williams said. "All downhill."
Foster essentially carried Williams on his second touchdown up there, shoving Oakland's Malcolm Smith every step of the way. As Foster put it with a bright smile, "The old man did his job on that one. Meaning DeAngelo and me."
Now isolate at the left edge of the line. That's Alejandro Villanueva just demolishing the Raiders' Mario Edwards Jr., after which, naturally, he extends a hand to pick him back up. Villanueva's day would later be defined by allowing the sack on which Roethlisberger was hurt, but he's been more good than bad in the infancy of his NFL career.
Add to this line Cody Wallace at center and all the enemies he's making -- those are tales probably best left on the field, from what I hear -- and the Steelers have a line that, while not perfect, is becoming as much a part of their offense as those at the skill positions.
"Yeah, we're hitting people," DeCastro said. "We're initiating. We're not sitting back and waiting to be hit. We're doing the hitting."
That's the offense. And as DHB suggested, it's special teams now, too ...
That's Nix, the blossoming fullback, flying into Oakland kick returner Taiwan Jones, who earlier in the week was boasting about being the NFL's fastest man. Now, he might be the Flash for all we know, but Nix blowing by the Raiders' Korey Toomer and becoming a projectile allowed Vince Williams and Anthony Chickillo to pounce.
The special teams have been awful in returning the ball but precisely the opposite in coverage. And this play was the icing on several weeks of the latter.
"We take so much pride not just in making the right play but in being physical," Shamarko Thomas was telling me. "We get that from our defense."
And that's really the foundation here ...
That's Mike Mitchell annihilating the Raiders' Latavius Murray, a wonderful young tailback whom Mitchell later would call "a good friend" from their time in Oakland. Say what you will about Mitchell's prancing and preening -- I see it as infantile at best, ill-advised at worst when the ball is on the ground -- but he's hitting people every which way they're unfortunate enough to turn.
And independent of his later sprint across the field to wish Murray well, Mitchell isn't coming close to apologizing for any of it.
"The NFL has cut down on hitting, but they haven't gotten rid of it," Mitchell said. "I'm not going to not be physical. If you come across the middle, I'm going to try to hit you. And I'll deal with the consequences later."
When is the last time anyone associated with the Steelers not named James Harrison talked that way, much less played that way?
You might not like Mitchell. I'd get that. He isn't especially likable, and take that from someone who regularly speaks with him on an amicable basis, if that makes any sense. But it would be folly to not acknowledge that two players in particular, Mitchell and Antwon Blake, have woken up this side of the Pittsburgh defense for the first time in half a decade.
And yes, they both are on even footing in this category.
"Those guys right now," Cam Heyward said, "we're feeding off them so much."
Blake gets a bit defensive on that topic. Always has. When he hears that he's a hitter or that he's always going for the pick or the strip, what he also hears is potential criticism that he's out of position. He's more sensitive than ever to that since being burned a few times two weeks ago in Kansas City.
"People talk about my personality or Mike's personality out there," Blake was saying. "Well, our first jobs, our personalities or whatever ... that's about keeping the other team from scoring, about keeping the ball in front of us."
But when I pressed further on this, Blake finally broke out a grin and came closer to the truth: "Look, Coach T tells me all the time, 'Don't go getting too sophisticated on me. Don't be getting sophisticated out there.' He never lets me forget it."
As he laughed about Mike Tomlin's admonishments after a game in which the coach said of his Steelers, "I can't say enough about the physicality out there," Blake also cringed a bit. His arm was still bound in a soft cast, and whatever was wrong in there clearly was bugging him more than he wanted to let on.
"It's OK. I'm probably going to have to play with it all year."
Martavis Bryant whizzes by the Raiders' Charles Woodson toward a 14-yard touchdown. -- GETTY