Steelers get one more opportunity to crush Cleveland’s dream

PITTSBURGH — If the going gets tough in, say, the third quarter Sunday night, with the Steelers’ defense trying to bow up for a goalline stand, Cam Heyward isn’t going to dig his right hand into the Heinz Field dirt, sweat dripping down his face, and start thinking about his team’s historic dominance against the guys from Cleveland.

Sure, the Steelers are 35-71 against the Browns since they returned to the NFL in 1999, 20-1 against them at Heinz Field — with the lone loss coming in 2003 — and 24-2-1 against them with Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback. They have six Super Bowl trophies to Cleveland’s zero. And even the last time the Browns made the playoffs, 18 years ago, that run was ended in the first round. By the Steelers. In Pittsburgh.

“I don’t really rely on that,” said Heyward, the team’s defensive captain. “I think I rely on our work we put in. It might not start out pretty — a lot of games don’t — but for us, we’ve just got to rely on what we’ve done.”

It’s rarely pretty for the Browns against the Steelers, who have reliably beaten them year in and year out, especially when it matters most. But if the Steelers aren’t thinking about that going into Sunday night’s meeting — just the third postseason matchup of Pittsburgh versus Cleveland — the Browns

aren’t either.

“We have a lot of guys here, myself included, that can’t really speak to some of those [historic] stats,” said first-year Browns coach Kevin Stefanski, who will miss the game after testing positive for COVID-19. “I know it’s boring, but we’re going to focus on going 1-0 this week.” About that last time … Following the original team’s relocation to Baltimore, the only time this iteration of the Browns franchise reached the playoffs, they ran into their longtime nemesis to the east. The Browns sneaked in as the sixth seed with a 9-7 record, ready to face the AFC North champions who finished 10-5-1.

They didn’t know it’d be their last time in the postseason for nearly two decades, but they started out like it. The Browns led, 17-7, at the half, eventually 24-7 and took a 24-14 lead into the third quarter, only for the Steelers to come storming back from down 13 in the final 13 minutes to win, 36-33.

That slammed the door on the Browns and began a playoff drought that now ends with a similar situation, a first-round game against the Steelers in Pittsburgh, the second wild card taking on the No. 3 seed that won the division.

Those are the parallels to present day, but there are other connections. One member of that Browns team was the father of Steelers linebacker Devin Bush, who won’t play this week because of a season-ending knee injury in Week 6 (against the Browns). Devin Bush Sr., was a veteran safety who retired after the 2002 season, but he wasn’t active in what would be the last game of his career.

But Alvin McKinley dressed for those Browns and got one of their three sacks in what would be his only postseason appearance. McKinley was hardly a big name in the NFL, or even in Cleveland, but he’s the uncle of Steelers rookie Kevin Dotson, who might start at left guard in his first playoff game.

And the most notable tie is that Keith Butler, now in his sixth season as the Steelers’ defensive coordinator, was then the Browns’ linebackers coach. Defensive coordinator Foge Fazio was fired after that loss, and Butler left for Pittsburgh the next season, where he has remained ever since.

“It didn’t happen for us that day,” Butler recalled this week. “It was a big deal.”

Even 21 playoff games later, all with the Steelers, that one still sticks with Butler. It still bothers him that the game resulted in the removal of Fazio, who never held another NFL coaching job.

An Alabama native who played his college ball at Memphis and then spent his whole pro career in Seattle, Butler witnessed for the first time Pittsburgh playing Lucy to Cleveland’s Charlie Brown.

“We go into the game thinking we have a chance to beat them, even though we didn’t beat them during the season. … It was going to be close,” Butler remembered. “We were on top of them, and we couldn’t maintain being on top of them. They ended up winning the game. What impressed me about that, the Rooneys came in — Dan Rooney, Mr. Rooney, came in and congratulated the Browns on what a good game it was, how we played. I thought it was a class act by those guys.”