"Everybody got a little piece of the pile," Diontae Johnson was telling me, magnificently mangling what he'd meant in the process.
Because, you know, piece of the pie, hand in the pile and all that.
But hey, the kid and his fellow kid wide receivers mangled the Miami defense, too, in the Steelers' 27-14 meh-fest Monday night at Heinz Field, so let's cut a little slack and let him keep talking:
"We were catching the ball," he'd continue. "We were contributing to the running game. We were blocking. We just ... it felt great out there, to be playing like that on a Monday night in front of Steelers Nation."
Never mind the setting. Never mind the meh-fest, either, for the moment, being that these were the Dolphins. What mattered most, at least from this press-box perch, is that Johnson, JuJu Smith-Schuster and, in his own way, James Washington finally, finally contributed something more than three hours of empty treadmarks in the turf.
Start with the seemingly routine:
That's the Steelers stuck at their 5-yard line early in the second quarter. It was third-and-11. Johnson beat Miami's excellent Xavien Howard to the sideline with a slick break, precisely the type of route-running that had the front office pumped about drafting him out of Toledo, and Mason Rudolph matched that precision with the delivery.
Not pictured: The offense was being thunderously booed just before that.
"Hey, I'd have booed that performance, too," Rudolph would say later. "We came out slow. I mean, it’s the Pittsburgh Steelers. There’s a standard here. We weren’t meeting it at the time."
Not until that simple play, maybe the first trace of competence to that stage, as Rudolph, in particular, had been understandably underwhelming coming off being knocked out cold the last time we'd seen him.
"A got-to-have-it play," Rudolph called it. And maybe it was, sparking a field-goal drive that nicked Miami's lead -- a rarity against anyone -- to 14-3.
Next possession, the final one of the half, the Dolphins did something so dumb that not even 0-7 can explain it: With the Steelers facing third-and-20 at the Miami 45, Brian Flores called a timeout and had his defense emerge in a Cover Zero formation.
Want to know why they call it Cover Zero?
Um, that. Because they elect to blitz the entire franchise, drop two defenders super-deep and ... cover zero others. Also, as if crafting a comedy skit, both of those deep dudes went with JuJu.
As David DeCastro caustically observed, "Yeah, I don't know what that was. But credit Mason. He read it right and attacked it."
Hang on with the credit. Because on the blame end, the first five questions of Flores' press conference were about his bizarre call. And the best of his five replies barely budged anyone's logic needle: "Wanted to be aggressive. We can second-guess a lot of calls. I'm not going to second-guess that one. I thought we had success with the call, and they made a play."
They did. Johnson caught a pass with enough terrain around him to start a small wheat farm, then rocketed toward the end zone with some gusto I hadn't previously seen from him, then benefited hugely from Washington's pancake block up there on Miami's Nik Needham.
"Huge play by James," Johnson told me.
Oh, he knew it. And on an otherwise exasperating night where Washington caught only one of Rudolph's six balls his way, he seemed to take solace in this.
"I had the block so I feel like that's my touchdown, you know?" he told me, his grin giving him away. "No, I was happy for him."
Overall, he added, "I feel like once we got going, once Mason got going, there wasn't any stopping us. That was a good feeling."
A feeling capped on the second possession of the third quarter, when Rudolph heaved and JuJu came down with one of the harder combat-catches of his career ...
... a 34-yarder that leapfrogged the Steelers ahead for good, 17-14.
See, the winless opponent doesn't matter there. Miami's Chris Lammons couldn't have covered JuJu more closely if he'd become one with the color-rush. He's stride for stride, arm in arm ... even appears to get his hand on the ball ... and it's rendered moot because of JuJu's relentless bid to overtake him, then twist away for the fall into the end zone.
That's gorgeous.
But that'd also gone missing through the bye.
JuJu's five catches came with 104 yards, or 19 more yards than any other game, and the touchdown was only his third all season. Blame the quarterback injuries, blame the double-coverage, blame the four measly targets the previous game in Los Angeles, blame whatever, but the numbers weren't exactly rising up to a No. 1 receiver's status, the way the catch up there does. He looked a little different on this night, a little more dynamic.
Finding a way to push through?
"Yeah, for a lot of guys in the league, being a No. 1 guy, when you don't get the ball, you know, you've just got to stay the course," JuJu would say when that came up. "I'll say for myself that, yeah, as a No. 1 guy, you expect more balls. But I think, at the end of the day, if we're getting ‘W’s and my team is happy, that's my game-changer there."
Wonderful, but even if that keeps changing, he can't do it alone. JuJu's 443 receiving yards rank 31st in the NFL, which brightens in the context that he's 51st in targets. But Johnson, including this season-best performance of five catches for 84 yards, ranks 72nd with 296 yards. Washington's way down at 130th.
I asked JuJu if one night might help:
From Foxborough onward, regardless of QB, I've cited a singular facet above all for this football team to contend, and it's been the collective play of the wide receivers. No one reasonably expected a replacement for Antonio Brown's production, but more surely should have come.
My feeling all along has been that there hasn't been enough separation, one bolstered through the first quarter of this game, when Rudolph waited forever without finding anyone open. Advanced stats that track separation appear to support that, with the Steelers being led in that category by a tight end, Vance McDonald, with an average of 4.2 yards of separation per route, compared to Johnson's 3.4, Washington's 2.6 and JuJu's 2.2, though the latter is heavily impacted by double-coverage.
It's been hard to figure. We'll see where it goes.
Candidly, I've got no clue what to make of the broader picture, either.
These Steelers are now 3-4, which sounds OK after 0-3 ... but two of those wins came against the Bengals and now the Dolphins, a combined 0-15. They're two games out of first place in the AFC North ... but let's not pretend the Ravens' rousing success in Seattle wasn't deflating. They have some players regaining health, most prominently a promising Rudolph ... but now they've lost James Conner to a shoulder injury, Ramon Foster to a concussion, and the offense isn't the side that can absorb that. The hyper-aggressive defense took four more takeaways, including two picks by Minkah Fitzpatrick ... but Miami's matador line ensured we'll wait another week until gauging Stephon Tuitt's absence. Kevin Colbert could seek out a trade in advance of today's deadline ... but he's got only five picks in the 2020 NFL Draft, and scant reason to reduce that.
Keep making catches, keep pushing the offense to catch up with the defense. Again, we'll see where it goes.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Steelers vs. Dolphins, Heinz Field, Oct. 28, 2019 -- MATT SUNDAY / DKPS