“Seahawks Fans Flock to Bay Area,” blared the headline earlier this week on A1, the cover of my old paper, the Seattle Times.

In other news, water has a tendency to run downhill.

In the NFL, there’s the post-season, and there’s the silly season. The latter comes about because there’s the extra week in the gap between the conference championships and the Super Bowl.

Therein, we get stories like the one on the Times’ website Thursday, in the apocryphal category of “News You Couldn’t Possibly Do Without.” This one was headlined: “How Seattle sports bars and pizzerias prepare for a Seahawks Super Bowl.”

Hmm, let me guess. Maybe by stocking more beer, dough and pepperoni?

I’ve always been amused by the double standard of newspaper execs when it comes to the sports department. Maybe it’s just me, but I sensed an unmistakable “toy-department” vibe from a good many of them, that the real news stories were generated elsewhere.

But let the local team do something big, something that captures national attention, and suddenly, we’re all in. The morning of the day the Bill Walton Trail Blazers would win a fourth game of the 1977 NBA finals against Philadelphia, the banner above the masthead of the Oregonian promised, “We’ll Win it Today.”

Yes, I’m being dismissive of the fluffy overkill of stories leading to the Super Bowl. Local television, it seems, feels duty-bound to interview every Seahawks fan on the street and ask what the final score will be.

An old boss of mine used to call those stories “thumb-suckers.” I’ve never heard anybody before or since who used the term, but it seems as good as any.

A mea culpa, though. Twenty years ago, I was commissioned to be a part of the pregame media blizzard, and I can’t say it turned out exactly how I would have drawn it up.

When the Seahawks qualified for their first Super Bowl in January of 2006, and Pittsburgh did the same with a victory at Denver, the Times sent me off to the Steel City to write about their football team for the week.

Some of the stories would be obvious: Ben Roethlisberger was the quarterback, Jerome Bettis the chief running back, finishing a Hall of Fame career.

But I’d be free to brainstorm other pieces, and before getting on the plane east, I lined up one of those: a story on Pittsburgh, a working man’s city. What was its ethos? Just how deeply entrenched was the football franchise, in a town where, for years, baseball has struggled so mightily?

Do it, I was encouraged enthusiastically.

I plunged into that story from the outset. Player access would be limited, and although I did them, I wasn’t going to be writing the definitive Roethlisberger or Bettis story. But maybe I could pull off a soul-of-Pittsburgh-through-a-Seattle-lens piece.

I wanted to go to a steel mill in the area and interview workers. Right away, I learned that wasn’t going to be possible, because there are no more steel mills in Pittsburgh. This is the Rust Belt, and those were from a different era. Pittsburgh is more about biotech now than steel.

No matter; I spent much of my trip on the Pittsburgh “scene.” I went down to Primanti’s, a landmark local restaurant. Visited with somebody from the convention-and-visitors bureau, as well as a gentleman from the Pittsburgh Technology Council. Anything related to Steeler mania – local TV ratings, merch -- I wanted to hear about.

I flew back on Friday, ready to spend the next week unloading “opponent” stories in the days before the game.

Sunday morning, the golden retriever got me up at 6 a.m. I took her out and shuffled out to the paper box.

There, bannered across Page A1, was a story on the ethos of Pittsburgh. A story with precisely the same angle I’d been pursuing.

In my sleepy fog, I fumbled to make sense of it. Had I filed that story already and forgotten about it? No, because I hadn’t written it yet.

What had happened was, in the flurry of Super Bowl planning – those stories of Seahawks fans who get tattoos of blocked punts on their foreheads -- the communication had broken down between editors, and one of them had hired a free-lancer from Pittsburgh to do the story.

Somehow.

I got the consolation prize of firing off an email, spitting sparks, to the managing editor. I'll have to admit, it was satisfying.

Several days later, they decided to run my story, apparently figuring there was always room for one more when you’re leading up to a Super Bowl.

It might have been one of the better ones in the Times that ever ran on Page D13.