It seems just about every year, when the Steelers and Browns are scheduled to play, there is some stupid/stock feature on Youngstown, Ohio as the dividing city between the 2 teams. It isn’t that it is a lie. I lived there, and it is fairly evenly divided — though, between the continued suckitude of the Browns and their absence in the 90s, it has tilted further to the Steelers. The problem is the story has been done to death. It’s a boring predictable piece.

So, naturally with the Backyard Brawl there was an attempt this past weekend to find a similar place between Pittsburgh and Morgantown.

ON THE ROAD BETWEEN LABORATORY AND LONE PINE — Among the modest, split-level houses and the occasional church or home business, U.S. Route 19 wends to and fro underneath Interstate 79, where the next exit south is the road to Prosperity, of all things.

Here, tucked inside this stretch of highways past and present, is the middle ground of local college-football fandom this week. It is precisely halfway to the site of old Pitt Stadium and halfway to the grounds of new Mountaineer Field. It is the center between the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh and the Evansdale campus in Morgantown, W.Va.

“We’re equidistant,” chimed in Critter from behind his beer at the Pancake Inn, just off I-79 Exit 30 in the Pancake Township also known as the east-Washington suburb of Laboratory.

Problem was, the majority of the area was pro-Pitt. The story still published. It took up plenty of space for no apparent reason, except that the reporter had come up with the story and spent the time researching and writing it, and the editors had decided to run it.