PITTSBURGH - Charlie Batch outplayed Daunte Culpepper. Outplayed? He was Ali to Culpepper's Wepner. He was rock to Culpepper's scissors. He was windshield to Culpepper's bug.

Batch was 126.5 by the quarterback rating.

Culpepper was 49.5.

That explains why Pittsburgh won its first game as defending Super Bowl champs and Miami saw its big off-season addition have the debut of Ishtar.

"Everybody was talking about the Dolphins, that it was going to be their year,'' Steelers receiver Heinz Ward said. "Well, don't forget that we're the champions."

You couldn't after Thursday's 28-17 season-opening win. There was the defensive line holding Dolphins running back Ronnie Brown to 30 yards on 15 carries. There was Willie Parker running behind that Steeler line for 115 yards on 29 attempts.

There, too, was Ben Roethlisberger in jeans on the sidelines healing from an appendectomy. No big matter. Batch did what Culpepper couldn't.

Down 17-14 in the fourth quarter, Batch took advantage of a confused Dolphins defense to throw an 87-yard touchdown pass to Heath Miller.

Actually, it should have been an 86-yard catch. Miller stepped out of bounds at the 1-yard line and Dolphins coach Nick Saban threw the replay flag on the field to challenge the call.

Oops, the referees didn't see the flag. And Saban, who has screaming fits at times, didn't yell for the referees to look. He expected them to see the obvious.

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Sure, even if it were overturned Pittsburgh would have first-and-goal at the 1-yard line. Those are good odds. But that was the exact situation Pittsburgh was in at the start of the second half and fumbled a handoff that Dolphins cornerback Will Allen fell on.

Still, it came down to Culpepper getting the ball twice in the final six minutes. Twice, he was intercepted.

There were a lot of good things in the Dolphins play to show why they're a good team. Culpepper wasn't one of them. He looked uncomfortable. He completed less than half his passes. And the memory you're stuck with isn't of him picking up a night up for grabs and bouncing it on his right arm a la Dan Marino.

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It's of him chasing down the field, sort of, after Pittsburgh linebacker Joey Porter intercepted a game-ending touchdown with about three minutes left.

You know, a la Jay Fiedler.

That was the second interception. Steelers safety Troy Polamalu got the first one. That's not what Dolphins fans wanted to walk away seeing. They wanted to say you saw something new and promising, that the chest of quarterback hope had been unlocked right from the moment the curtain went up.

"In the fourth quarter, you can't turn the ball over in this league,''

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Culpepper said. "I'm better than that. We're better than that. We've just got to figure out ways to do better and in that situation not let that happen."

When Culpepper went through the preseason without a touchdown pass, it didn't much matter. His health mattered first. His play hardly mattered at all.

But now we're to the point in the road where his play matters and he completed 18 passes for 37 passes for 262 yards. No touchdowns. And there were the two interceptions in the end, the ones that guaranteed for all the good the Dolphins did this night would be buried under a stinking pile of confusion and controversy.

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It could have been three interceptions, too. Ike Taylor dropped an easy one in the end zone.

Batch, meanwhile, threw three touchdown passes. He completed 15 of 25 passes for 209 yards. He wasn't Roethlisberger, but that wasn't asked on this night.

He played better than the heralded guy on the other side. That was enough.

"It's one game,'' Culpepper said. "We've got 15 left."

It's still early enough to say that's a promise, not a warning.