TAMPA, Fl — Nevertheless, the Steelers of Pittsburgh will keep this Super Bowl trophy. They can put it with the other five, and tell lies later about how this one was a cinch.

It was not. This one was all thumb screws and root canals, shock and awesome, slap and smack, a duel in the cool tropical night.

“This is for you Pittsburgh!” shouted game MVP Santonio Holmes, raising the Lombardi Trophy over his head as if it were the first one instead of the sixth, as if the town had never seen the others.

This may be the least of all the Super Bowl winning Steeler teams, though the trophy is exactly the same size as all the rest.

They passed the shiny symbol around, from owner to coach to players, toted to the ceremony for some undeclared reason by Joe Namath, the trophy a hard earned souvenir, harder than the Steelers thought. Winners get to leave fingerprints.

Losers—in this case the Cardinals are not losers as much as companions in as gutsy, gut-wrenching, a melodrama as any since…well, since last year when the wrong team won with a helmet catch—are left with highlights.

And the Cardinals had highlights, the highest and lightest a catch and run of 64 yards by Roy Fitzgerald that would have, should have stunned the Steelers into an admission that fate or chance was wearing a Cardinal on its hat.

“The Steelers are a 60 minute team,” said their coach, Mike Tomlin.

This one was won with a classic, almost cliché catch, the kind that is staged in movies or dramatized in sports books, impossible and indelible, the football equivalent of the buzzer beater or the walk off homer. It had everything but slow motion, and it even had that later as it was studied for validity and, probably, for artistry.

“Great players step up in big-time games to make plays,” said Holmes. “I knew that was my play. Ben stuck with me, put it up where it was supposed to be and I made the play.”

Whether Holmes is a great player, certainly he had the greatest game of his life and one of the greatest of any receiver in a Super Bowl, for effectiveness and drama, not that the same wouldn’t have been said of Fitzgerald had Holmes not made The Catch.

Unlike the stadium witnesses, who may have chewed their fingernails down, Holmes had just enough left on his hands to stretch, hold the football, “come down on his toes”, as the referee finally and officially confirmed, and lock down a victory nearly blown from 13 points in front.

And, just like that, David Tyree’s helmet catch for the Giants against the Pats last year was bumped from the top of Great Super Bowl Moments.

“We embrace those moments,” said Tomlin. “We are built for those moments.”

The game did not match the boasts nor beat the spread, and the Steelers’ special torment for the Cardinals was to allow them to think they belonged.

“Nobody expected us to be here,” said Cardinal quarterback Kurt Warner, as if he needed to remind anyone of that. “We exceeded expectations and came close to being world champions only to lose it.”

Fewer penalties and just anyone, Warner having the best chance, tripping up Steeler linebacker James Harrison on the last play of the first half as he was galumphing a record 100 yards with an interception for the longest play in Super Bowl history, and the Cardinals would have had the whip in their hands.

This was a memorable Super Bowl because the Cardinals flirted with the improbable, and the Steelers—except for the plays by Harrison and Holmes—were not good enough to do anything about it.

Arizona could allow itself to believe in destiny even with a half minute to play, until the last five seconds, until Arizona quarterback Warner lost the football, breaking the heart of a perfectly nice place like Arizona.

The Steelers were not going to be lucked out of their birthright, and they weren’t going to be passed or punched or tackled out of it either.

“We back up talk with action,” said Tomlin.

“Backyard ball,” said Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, describing his cobbling together the final, winning drive, and at the same time coining a T-shirt slogan if ever there was one.

“It’s never going to be pretty or perfect,” said Tomlin. “There are no style points out there. But this is a team with great resolve.”

Winners can, and will, say all these things, of course, as Arizona would have said and even more loudly, because the Cardinals would have been the most astonishing winners ever of the Super Bowl, at least since the Jets beat the Colts in the third one.

Maybe that was why Namath was here, to represent audacity and surprise, and it was all there for the Cardinals.

So close. So long.