CLEVELAND -- "Let's go! Pack up! Pack up and get to the bus! I've got work for y'all!"
That was Mike Tomlin authoritatively booming his way through the soggy towels, the strewn equipment bags and a sea of smiles and backslaps across the Steelers' locker room. It was late Sunday afternoon at FirstEnergy Stadium, and what had seemed almost mythical just a few hours earlier, much less a week earlier after stunningly falling flat against one-third of an NFL roster in Baltimore, was now the realest of realities.
Steelers won. Bills won. And next up ...
"We're in the playoffs," Jarvis Jones fairly beamed from his stall. "Dude, we are in ... the ... playoffs. We're in. We're really in."
Yeah, they're in. They're going right back to Cincinnati this Saturday -- 8:15 p.m. kickoff -- for a Paul Brown Stadium rematch with the Bengals. And after that, they'd go to Denver the following Sunday for another rematch, this with the Broncos, the AFC's top seed.
And the reason they'll be doing all this, apart from the aid package from Buffalo and apart from eventually doing what everyone does here and burying the Browns, 28-12, is that this is the toughest, most resilient set of Steelers our town has seen in far too long.
Of course, they're also confounding, exhilarating, infuriating, breathtaking, bungling, brilliant and all manner of other adjectives and invectives. They've been all those things all along, and they were again Sunday with Ben Roethlisberger's two hideous picks, just as it's about his 349 yards and three TDs. It's about another major piece going down in DeAngelo Williams with his twisted ankle, just as it's about omnipresent Lawrence Timmons' 10 tackles and 1.5 sacks. It's about Martavis Bryant going down, just as it's about Antonio Brown amassing 13 more catches. It's about Antwon Blake getting scorched worse than the threadbare field, just as it's about ... um, James Harrison with an interception and two passes defensed?
"There's not much I like about coverage," Harrison would say later, not at all joking.
But he did it. It wasn't pretty, but it got done.
That's this team, my friends. That's who they are.
Sure, you'll be within your rights to doubt them next weekend in Cincinnati. Ample precedent suggests they're every bit as likely to blow out the Bengals again as they are to lay the largest land-mammal egg in Ohio history. But don't doubt their resolve. Don't doubt their confidence. Don't doubt their will.
Don't doubt this assessment of their playoff potential:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoUxS1uE0Tg
And you know, don't take my word for it, or even Harrison's. Come see for yourself.
But watch out for those towels and bags. That's what Art Rooney II was advising his father, Dan, as he made his dutiful rounds to shake the hand of each player. This wasn't a special occasion in that context. Both have been doing it for decades. Every game. Win or lose.
“It starts with our owners. It starts with the Rooneys. They don’t panic," Darrius Heyward-Bey was saying from nearby. "And our head coach doesn’t panic. So we don’t panic."
The head coach, as ever, wouldn't let anyone else write his script, when I asked what this particular playoff qualification meant after all the adversity.
"We're not trying to make broad, sweeping statements about who we are," he replied. "We know who we are. We know what we're capable of. I think it's just more appropriate that we show you with how we perform moving forward."
Make no mistake, though: His voice carried the most. Not just in shouting instruction, either. He might not admit this, but he spent at least one of his breaks in the fourth quarter shouting toward Craig Wolfley at the edge of the Steelers' sideline in search of updates from Buffalo. And once he had his team around him in the locker room, even through a closed metal door, the roars that emanated following his brief speech probably would have shamed the legends over at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
"We have an excited locker room in there," Tomlin would divulge. "And rightfully so. It's been a tough 16-week fight for us, but we're where we want to be. We recognize that we're not perfect. But we have an opportunity, like others in the field, and for that we're grateful."
The playoffs are "the tournament," he called it. And he must have called it that several times, because players suddenly started using it, too.
Tomlin has many faults. Leading men isn't on the list.
Let's keep moving.
In fact, let's walk back in time, to late September in St. Louis, where it looked like Roethlisberger's season had ended and, in turn, that of the Steelers. They were relegated to using Michael Vick and Landry Jones, and all looked lost to all but the most hopeless of optimists.
Don't lie. You thought they were done, too.
On that day, inside that mostly mild room following the win over the Rams, Ramon Foster told me this: "We're going to make the playoffs. It won't be pretty, but we'll make it."
I reminded the big man of that statement Sunday.
"We had to believe, and we had to band together," Foster could say now. "We did. All of us. And that's what family does."
At the stall to Foster's left, David DeCastro chimed in, "The most important thing was to stay focused, to stay locked in. That wasn't always there the way we wanted it, obviously, but we're here. We're in. And now everybody's got the same record, the same chance."
At the stall to Foster's right -- seriously, these offensive linemen are inseparable -- Marcus Gilbert got a bit emotional: "Not everything went right. Not for us, either."
The line, he meant. It's easy to forget, given how well Cody Wallace and Alejandro Villanueva played, but Maurkice Pouncey and Kelvin Beachum were lost long ago.
"But we're in, brother. We ... are ... in," Gilbert added. "And we know what we can do, what we can handle, because we've already taken the worst and kept going."
Roethlisberger absorbed much of the worst, from that frightening knee injury in St. Louis to the foot a few weeks later to the concussion protocol. So it shouldn't have surprised that, while most of his mates were whooping and hollering as they came off the field, the quarterback strode silently and stared straight ahead.
Where might his mind have wandered?
"For me, the first thing that pops into my mind, it's about stepping up," Ben replied when asked how this playoff berth might feel different. "Coach always says, 'Next man up, next man up.' I don't know that it could be any more true than this year. We've never really made the playoffs where we've had to do what we've done."
The most vocal reaction coming off the field, also no surprise, was that of Vince Williams. He let out the equivalent of a primal, unintelligible scream.
"I couldn't be happier," Williams explained a few minutes later. "And I couldn't be more appreciative."
Oh, yeah. That.
Williams made headlines earlier this week for tweeting that he'd offer his younger brother, Karlos, a running back with the Bills, a Super Bowl ticket if Buffalo did its part. Turns out that was just the beginning.
"He's getting a plane ticket, too," Williams told me. "The whole deal."
Mike Mitchell didn't seem happy. He seldom does. But that's just his thing, and it takes a while to see and appreciate that there's more to him.
"People didn't believe in us," he started our talk with the standard snarl. "I'm talking media, fans, everybody. We were left for dead after last week. Everybody got off the wagon."
I gently reminded that people have a right to feel as they please. And that Baltimore was an exceptionally difficult loss for all concerned.
"Yeah, I know. But my point is that we believed. We believe."
I'd swear the man almost smiled.
The final stop on the tour takes us to, of all people, Anthony Chickillo.
At precisely 3:36 p.m. and with precisely 10:43 remaining in the fourth quarter, the sparingly used sixth-round rookie linebacker sprinted down the middle of the field on kickoff coverage. As he informed me that he likes to do, he went helmet first at the football in the hands of Cleveland's Raheem Mostert, and out it came:
Chickillo bounced off the field like a child, both arms raised.
"I can't even begin to tell you how that felt," he said. "To do that for this team, in that moment ... these are my brothers in here."
The moment was enormous. The Steelers sealed the victory shortly thereafter.
But the moment, remarkably, wasn't unique.
At precisely 3:36 p.m. and with precisely 10:43 remaining in the fourth quarter, but about three hours further up Interstate 90 in Buffalo, the Bills picked off the Jets' Ryan Fitzpatrick for the first of three times. New York had been steamrolling down the field to that point. Leodis McKelvin changed all that:
If I was a hopeless sap, I'd point out here that 3:36 p.m. marked the time of day for another infinitely greater Pittsburgh sporting moment, way back on the 13th of October in 1960:
I won't do that, of course. That would be silly.
But teams that have stuff like this occur -- meaning this whole psycho season -- probably aren't the best to bet against.