Steelers "Lived By The Sword, Died By The Sword"

All too many times, the Pittsburgh Steelers have given opponents every chance to win the game, only to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat over and over again. The Baltimore Ravens know this perhaps better than any other Pittsburgh opponent, but they are not alone. Twice in this past season, including the playoffs, the Baltimore Ravens led the Steelers in the second half, only to see the game slip away on a turnover, botched play or some other mistake that had Ravens fans thinking seriously about jumping off the ledge or massing outside the Ravens Practice facility, screaming for the heads of certain coaches.

However, in Super Bowl XLV, the Steelers "luck" finally ran out. Pittsburgh had routinely allowed teams to take a seemingly insurmountable lead, only to watch the black & yellow storm back and win the game in the final moments. Super Bowl 43 was a perfect example of this when they scored with seconds left be the Arizona Cardinals. Even the Green Bay Packers had been part of one of these situations, when in 2009, Ben Roethlisberger found rookie Mike Wallace along the sideline of the end zone for the winning TD on the game's final play.

After allowing the Packers to storm out to a 14 point lead which swelled to 18 at one point (21-3), Pittsburgh put together a string of clutch plays to get within a field goal, only to see Green Bay respond when they needed to with a field goal and touchdown of their own to help provide enough of a lead that could not be overcome.

Thus we get the saying in the title of this post, "live by the sword, die by the sword," meaning that at some point of pulling these wins out of their collective butts, it was only a matter of time before the Steelers finally lost one. Lucky for the Packers (and all the Steelers' haters out there), it came on the sport's biggest stage in front of the largest television audience of all time.

Winning these types of games got the Steelers to the Super Bowl and losing the same way was the perfect way for the season to end, at least for the fans in Wisconsin and most of Maryland!