Mike Celizic

You have to feel happy for Pittsburgh and Detroit’s hometown hero, Jerome Bettis, and that has to go double for Seattle, which never has known the pleasure of going to the Super Bowl.

I intend to enjoy the game a great deal, just as I’ve enjoyed every championship game in every sport I’ve been to, even the World Cup. The Seahawks and Steelers are the best teams in their sport, as they impressively proved through the playoffs.

But let’s face it, this isn’t exactly the matchup most fans waited all year to see. As good a story as the Steelers are with Big Ben and Joey Porter and Bettis and Bill Cowher and that jaw of his that’s so big it has its own zip code, they’re not the Indianapolis Colts and Peyton Manning. Nor are they the New England Patriots and Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.

And the Seahawks, despite the record-setting running of Shaun Alexander and the cool efficiency of quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, aren’t the Dallas Cowboys or the Chicago Bears or the New York Giants or the Washington Redskins.

Seattle is a great city, and if you’ve never had smoked salmon and Dungeness crab, you’re missing out on some of the best eating on the planet. But to most Americans, it’s that place where it rains all the time, so far up in the Pacific Northwest, it might as well be Canada.

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Steelers-Seahawks may or may not be a great matchup. We’ll let history decide that. Right now, all we know is they are a match made for Detroit.

If you want Broadway shows, you go to New York. If you want great Super Bowl destinations, you go to California, Florida, Arizona, or, in the good old days, to New Orleans.

And if you want Seattle-Pittsburgh, you go to Detroit.

It’s not true, as some have said, that Detroit is like Baghdad without the Green Zone. It’s more like Newark, but without the direct trains to New York City. But, the city did build a dome for its team, and that’s all the NFL needs — a free stadium — to give a city a Super Bowl.

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Why the city needed a dome at all is another question. At one level, it makes sense in that it allows Lions fans to watch lousy football in comfort instead of having to sit not only through discouraging losses but also through them in rain, sleet and snow.

But it’s a pox on the rest of football fandom, who have to go to Detroit periodically to see the Super Bowl instead of to somewhere warm, where they can play golf, lie on the beach, and come back with that healthy February tan that tells everyone in their offices that the lucky fan has been somewhere neat while their co-workers have been hunched over keyboards in cubicles basking in fluorescent light.

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I say this not out of malice or ignorance; I grew up an easy drive from Cleveland and I have family in the Detroit area. There are plenty of fine communities around Detroit, just as there are around Newark, and there are a few places in both cities worth finding.

But the Super Bowl is spring break for adults, and no one goes north for spring break, unless they live in Tierra del Fuego. And the Super Bowl is fun and festivities and parties, and it’s hard to feel cheerful when icicles are hanging off your nose and your shoes are stained with road salt.

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