Disappointed Jets fans 'used to it'

They're Jets fans. They already expected the worst.

But despite a tough-to-stomach loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers Sunday night in the AFC Championship Game, denying their team a trip to the Super Bowl once again and making an already bone-chilling Monday-morning commute that much colder, Jets fans said the team played a great game - well, half a great game, anyway.

"I wasn't expecting them to win," Jeff Waldner, 34, of Stony Brook, who works in finance in Manhattan, said Monday as he stopped into a 7-Eleven in Lake Grove. "But, I'm not going to change my allegiance. I'm happy with what they're doing. I'm still a fan."

Of course, it was tough being a fan the morning after the Jets fell to the Steelers, 24-19, at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh. The Jets fell behind 24-0 - the team's furious comeback fell short.

For the Steelers, who will met the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl on Feb. 6 in Arlington, Tex., it will be their eighth appearance in the big game - tying them with the Dallas Cowboys for most appearances in history. The Steelers have won six times.

The Jets won the Super Bowl in their only appearance - way back in Super Bowl III.

That was 1969 and "Broadway Joe" Namath was the quarterback, having guaranteed the upstart Jets would beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts, which they did, 16-7.

No such luck for the team since: The Jets have now lost four times in the AFC Championship Game, the last step before the Super Bowl. This was the second-straight season the team lost in the game.

"You probably won't see a lot of Jets fans this morning," Lee Heiser, 52, of Stony Brook, said Monday as he gassed up his car at a Hess station in Lake Grove. Heiser said he is a Dallas Cowboys fan. "They're probably still inside . . . But I was rooting for them."

Jets fans were, in fact, out and about Monday morning, some of them stopping in at the Middle Country Road 7-Eleven in Lake Grove during their morning commute.

Employee Richard Loggia, 50, of Centereach, said that he, like most of those fans, was disappointed with the outcome.

He noted "they've been to the championship game now two years in a row. They're right there. They're so close."

Loggia also believed the Jets would complete their second-half rally with a victory, matching some of the team's late-game heroics from the regular season.

"I think they should have won," Loggia said.

Still fans like Tim Brady, 53, of Centereach, are excited about the future.

Brady, who is not related to New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady despite the fact his father and brother are both named Tom, said he's been a Jets fan as long as he can remember - and he remembers when Namath and the Jets beat the Colts.

"They did not show up for the first half," Brady, a steamfitter, said of Sunday's game against the Steelers. "But they played an outstanding game."

He wondered, like most Jets fans did, what might have happened had the team not fallen so far behind - or, what might have happened had the Jets scored a touchdown when they moved the ball to the one-yard line late in the game, trailing 24-10. If that might have changed the outcome.

"It would have been a whole different ballgame," Brady said.

He said all his friends were heartbroken over the loss.

And, so was he. "Let me put it this way," he said. "I'm a Jets fan 45 years. I'm used to it."