Big Ben & Co. deliver matchup everyone wants

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In the end, there was a desperate stadium trying to drown the Steelers with thunder, hoping against hope for one stop and one more opportunity to buy an extra week of season. Arrowhead Stadium can be a pretty intimidating place, after all, especially with a game — with a season — on the line.

And then Ben Roethlisberger, flushed from the pocket, found Antonio Brown.

And suddenly the dream AFC Championship that everyone wanted to see — well, everyone beyond the borders of this snake-bitten football town, anyway — was on. It will be Patriots-Steelers next Sunday night in Foxboro thanks to this hard-earned 18-16 Steelers win.

For the Chiefs, it was a fourth maddening division-round home loss over the past two decades. In 1995, 1997 and 2003, the Chiefs finished 13-3, the first two times under Marty Schottenheimer, the last under Dick Vermeil, and had lost in stunning fashion to the Colts, Broncos and Colts.

Now, it was Andy Reid’s turn. It was the Steelers’ turn to walk into Arrowhead and break the locals’ hearts. The Steelers never did find the end zone all night, but six times, they found the middle of the uprights, and those six Chris Boswell field goals were enough to deliver Pittsburgh.

Steelers-Pats is where the Patriots’ dynasty began, after all, back in January 2002, the Pats going to Pittsburgh and beating the Steelers, Drew Bledsoe coming in to sub for an injured Tom Brady. Fifteen years later, the Steelers will be the ones hoping to land a stunning championship-round blow.

And part of the reason the Steelers emerged as the people’s choice is because of what they can throw at the Patriots. There is Roethlisberger and Brown, of course, always deadly, who never hooked up for six points but converted the clinching first down with a minute and a half left and the Chiefs out of timeouts.

And, of course, there is the wonderful Le’Veon Bell, who chewed up the Chiefs all night and allowed the Steelers to control so much of the game. This may not have been the thrill-packed event the Packers-Cowboys lead-in was, but it turned out pretty OK in the end. Especially for Pittsburgh.

Morning dawned, and sure enough, there was the ice, which arrived on schedule if not in the apocalyptic quantities predicted. Western Missouri and eastern Kansas had braced themselves all week, and the NFL had switched the start time of the Chiefs-Steelers game, but by 3:30 local time, four hours before kickoff, the parking lots were stuffed with tailgaters.

“Perfect football weather!” a man wearing an old Derrick Thomas No. 58 jersey screamed at a group of folks walking toward Arrowhead Stadium. He guzzled a beer in his left hand and held the rest of the 12-pack in the other, and he admonished anyone who was dressed a little too much for blizzard. “No gloves today!” he shouted. “Take your hat off !” he pleaded. He stopped short of asking for shirts to be removed, but there was at least a 40 percent chance he would be shedding his sometime before the end of Sunday night’s festivities.

Yes, there is nothing quite so perfect in all of sports as football and foul weather, which probably goes back to childhood, to kids playing tackle football on snowy days. That’s the part that football borrows from other sports, the part that allows you to connect with the athletes. Football isn’t baseball, where everyone starts playing Wiffle ball. Football isn’t basketball, where everyone plays H-OR-S-E starting in kindergarten.

But football in the snow? Football in the rain? Football on a frosty day? We can all relate to that. It’s why Sunday’s game had a little extra intrigue. The NFL doesn’t just move its games around without serious reasoning behind it, and as the 80,000 fans filed into Arrowhead they discovered just about every seat frozen solid. Football and foul weather. An irresistible combination every time.