Steelers Nation Annual To-Do List

From Jonathan Barnes at the Barnestormin blog:

I’m not happy about the Steelers loss to the Jaguars, but I am relieved. If they’d won we probably would have had to see them lose further into the playoffs, when it would’ve hurt even worse. Now that the season is behind us, I’ve been thinking of how to rebuild morale among fans of the team and among the Steelers themselves. The answer is, of course, outsourcing. We should outsource some of our Pittsburgh-ness to like-minded folks across the country.

There’s a lot of talk during football season about the Pittsburgh Steelers Nation—the widespread group of expatriate (and non-native) fans that don their Steelers-themed clothes and root for the hometown win. But once the football season ends for our team, we Pittsburghers tend to forget about our wide network of Steelers kinsmen. Similarly, those fans in San Diego, Seattle, Baltimore, and beyond tend to forget about the Steel City when the Steelers aren’t playing. Maybe it’s that aching that we feel when the Steelers don’t win the Super Bowl that keeps us from staying in closer touch. Or maybe it’s the painful nostalgia that expatriates feel when they think of being away from their homeland.

Whatever the reason for our distance from each other, we Steelers fans need to stick even closer together in the off-season than we do during the season. Those of us in the Promised Land of Pittsburgh take our hills, foods, sayings and ways for granted. But people who left, even if they left decades ago, still get a wistful look when they talk about our City of Champions. We know that oftentimes their love for the Steelers is wrapped up with their love for Pittsburgh, a place where they sometimes wish they were, but cannot be. To fight the ennui that falls like a winter freeze in the off-season, folks in the Greater Steelers Nation can do more than a few things to keep their Pittsburgh Spirit alive throughout the year:

I'll add one more item to his list: Join IntoPittsburgh.