ERIE, Pa. – Elana Dolan had a choice, the same one that presents itself to so many people in this 94,000-person city tucked into the northwest corner of Pennsylvania:
Buffalo Bills or Pittsburgh Steelers?
Both of those NFL cities – and Cleveland too – are a relatively short drive from Erie, giving football fans here a distinct set of choices that hint at (or maybe even shape) personality types.
Do you love a winner? (The Steelers have six Super Bowl championships.)
Or do you embrace the scrappy underdog? (The Bills have never won a Super Bowl. The Cleveland Browns have never played in one.)
Those choices are in clear focus this weekend when, for the first time since 2020, all three teams are in the playoffs and – most notably for Dolan – the Steelers travel to Western New York to meet the Bills for a snowstorm-delayed game Monday at Highmark Stadium.
Dolan, who turned 19 this week, is coming from a split-football household. It’s a thing here in Erie, where teases and taunts and cheers and jeers are going to be tossed between people gathering around the same televisions on game day. For Dolan, it goes like this: “My mom’s side of the family was Steelers all the way,” she said last week at Erie Ale Works, a Bills Backers chapter location where she visited with her dad, T.J. “My Dad was Bills.”
The reasons are geographic and generational: T.J. Dolan is from Rochester, and started attending Bills games in college with his roommate, who had season tickets. At some point when he met his future wife, who was from the Erie area, he learned that her family was part of the fan base known as Steeler Nation. Their divided loyalties clearly didn’t hinder their love for each other. But their marriage didn’t convert their fandom, either. In some families with parents who have diverging views, the kids eventually find themselves with choices about things like politics or religion.
In places like Erie, you make choices…
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