It is more than slightly alarming, my friend. 

Just today, my mother took me out for icecream because I’m moving down to Pittsburgh with my friend to start this new job that’s going to take a scythe to my soul, and as we were sitting there, an ad came on for a mattress sale.  It was called the “Football Season Sale”.   And I said to my mother, ‘Sometimes, I wonder what it must be like to like football.  I wonder what it must be like to have something you love touted as great, and your love for it validated in every tiny thing you do.   Buying a mattress, eating Tortilla chips (because you’d better believe there are Steelers tortilla chips), going to a restaurant, getting a hair cut, buying groceries, having something that people at work will connect to you about.’  

I went to school at the University of Pittsburgh for two years.  One night in early 2006, I was sitting in my dorm with my roommate Melissa and we said, “Oh, we should go eat something.”   Not five minutes later, we heard a deafening roar erupt from the streets three floors below us, the windows began to shake, and we could feel rumbling in the floor.  

We looked out the window and people were pouring into the streets.  I mean the literal 'cars are trying to drive on them’ streets.  Cars were honking, people were throwing drinks and trampling each other. There were yellow towels being whipped through the air.  Melissa was from Philly, she didn’t know the yellow towels, but I was raised in this shit hole.  

“Oh, god,” I said, “was there football today?”

We refreshed the internet, and Yahoo confirmed that the Steelers had just won the Super Bowl while she and I laughed at shit on LiveJournal.  

We were nearly wrestled to the ground when we went to try to get subs for dinner. Someone hit me in the side of the head with their waterbottle or something if I recall correctly. There was a burning sofa in someone’s lawn.  By the time we woke up in the morning, the parking meters for our dorm had been ripped out, Subway and GNC no longer had an awning, and Blockbuster had a window broken.  There was black and gold devastation everywhere, and it was legitimately terrifying to go outside that night.  People wearing opposing team colors were beaten up. 

Everything you touch from September to March is covered in footballs and/or painted black and gold.  Because so many things here are local to here, it just feeds on itself like this incestuous feedback loop of 'football’ 'fOOtbALL’ 'FOOTBALL’ FOOOTBAWLL!!’  It is the thing you are all expected to love, and following it is damn near compulsory even if you hate it.  I know groups of people who hate football that have Steelers parties.  I guess the Steelers were a team that was very locally grounded, the Eat 'n’ Park restaurants you see here are a local phenomenon so they get into it too, Sheetz is all in this area, so they do it, Giant Eagle is all here, so THEY do it, there is literally nothing here that isn’t JUST here, so they all just start doing this because it’s not like it’s a national corporation that needs to worry about how to sell to people who aren’t frothing at the mouth about this obnoxious game.  

 This area harps on things being local not in the way that Portland did (out of a desire for green things and organics), but because the rural communities get suspicious of things from outside and I am convinced that some of them just would not understand things from the outside.  They need things to be local because they feel superior or something. Anything can become a source of pride if you say it’s from Pittsburgh, even if it’s something like seamless pipes or an actor vaguely spent time here once.  The area I’m in now has an entire festival because they think Charlie Chaplain was here once. Some of them get visibly angry when they see other sports teams, like I said, people get beaten up for wearing the wrong colors. 

And the Steelers, for some reason, conjure loyalty from people who have never been here and people who move away and are just as vehement about it even when out of the frothing marinade of fucking hysteria that this shit sets off.  There’s a Steelers only bar in nearly every major city.  I saw the ad for one in Portland Oregon, and my aunt goes to one in Ft. Meyers Florida. 

There’s an entire store that sells nothing but Steelers things.  Not just like, a department store with a Steelers section, ONLY Steelers things.  Even the people who own the team are idolized and turned into collectibles.

I couldn’t believe how much less stress I was under when I was in Portland and never heard about football.  Here, people will actively follow highschool teams like they’re just not getting enough football with it on every channel.  I grew up with people who hated football as much as I did and once we were grown they just said, “Well, I watch it now because you have to, it’s the Steelers.”   There is SO MUCH PRESSURE to conform to the FOOOTBAWL, I can’t even express this enough. 

I hate football. I hate this area. 

It is so so so so much more than slightly alarming.