Rob Carr / AP

Steelers receiver Hines Ward celebrates after a reception. Pittsburgh beat Baltimore in the AFC Championship game on Sunday and advanced to Super Bowl XLIII.

updated 10:17 p.m. ET Jan. 18, 2009

PITTSBURGH - Tough and mean, like the original Steel Curtain.

These Pittsburgh Steelers delivered too many hard hits and their quarterback was steady enough to outplay the kid and the rest of the Baltimore Ravens.

With Troy Polamalu ending any chance Baltimore had for a comeback with a 40-yard interception return, the Steelers bullied their rivals 23-14 on Sunday to reach their seventh Super Bowl.

“It was a typical, hard-hitting, physical game. It’s the way every Baltimore-Pittsburgh game is,” said Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward, who missed most of the game with a knee injury. “Sometimes guys get hit so hard, you don’t know if they’re going to get up. They say defense wins championships, well, we have the No. 1 defense. And they’re the reason why we’re really going to the Super Bowl.”

Next, Ben Roethlisberger and Pittsburgh will play the Arizona Cardinals in two weeks in Tampa.

After beating Baltimore for the third time, the Steelers set up an intriguing matchup — Mike Tomlin vs. the Cardinals’ Ken Whisenhunt, the offensive coordinator when the Steelers won the Super Bowl three seasons ago who went to Arizona after being passed over for Pittsburgh’s job.

Whisenhunt and his top assistant, Russ Grimm, left after the Steelers unexpectedly hired Tomlin, who has done something even Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher couldn’t do by taking Pittsburgh to the Super Bowl in his second season.

The Steelers harassed Joe Flacco all game long as he tried to become the first rookie quarterback to take a team to the Super Bowl. Normally unflappable, he looked lost at times and finished 13-for-30 for 141 yards and three costly interceptions.

Instead, Pittsburgh ended its home-field jinx in AFC championship games.

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“It’s always that way,” said Roethlisberger, who took a vicious shot to his shoulder in the first half. “This is always a 12-round slugfest. We always go at it. It’s always violent from start to finish. I was ready when I took a knee at the end, you never know when somebody is going to fire off the ball.”

Roethlisberger, picked off four times by New England in his rookie-year AFC title game, was a workmanlike 16-of-33 for 255 yards and, most importantly, no interceptions. If nothing else, it showed how much experience mattered in a game so important.

“Here’s my advice to the Arizona Cardinals: Don’t rush Ben Roethlisberger,” the Ravens’ Trevor Pryce said. “After that, he’s a playground football player. That’s what he is, and he’s a damn good one.”

Roethlisberger would laugh at that analogy — he said the Steelers’ big of the game, a 65-yard touchdown pass to Santonio Holmes that made it 13-0, was an improvised play “just like on the playground.”

After Polamalu’s twisting, turning run sealed it with 4:39 to play, the game was held up when Willis McGahee, who scored both Baltimore touchdowns, was carted off the field following a frightening hit to the helmet by Pittsburgh safety Ryan Clark.

The Ravens said he had “significant neck pain,” but movement in his arms and legs.

Only the Steelers, 49ers and Cowboys have won five Super Bowls, and Pittsburgh can be the first to win six. If the Steelers beat Arizona, the 36-year-old Tomlin would be the youngest coach to win an NFL championship.

“They did it tonight the way we’ve done it all year,” Tomlin said. “We’ve got a very humble group, a very selfless group.”

Earlier in the day, before Whisenhunt knew the outcome of the Steelers-Ravens game, he said he wanted to match up against Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl.

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The Steelers proved it is possible to beat a good team three times in a season, and will now face a team they share a history with. They were merged as Card-Pitt during World War II in 1944 when the Cardinals were in Chicago and went 0-10, the only winless team in Steelers history.

Steelers owner Dan Rooney recalls them being nicknamed the Car-Pitts “because everybody walked all over us.”

Nobody walks over these Steelers, a hard-hitting, tough-guy team with the NFL’s best defense, at least statistically, in nearly 20 years. The unit is a worthy descendant of the Steel Curtain teams of the 1970s that virtually defined the way defense is supposed to be played.

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