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.
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