By football's clock it's somewhere amid the ancient history of last year, by most anyone's calendar it was nearly nine months ago, and in all but a few memories a forgotten, meaningless touchdown on a 25-degree January night of blowing snow and rattling bones.

But in the Steelers locker room, especially in those pockets where people who play pass defense for a living tend to station themselves, they remember it like it was last night.

Because it was frightening.

"Oh yeah," said safety Ryan Clark as the Steelers prepared for tonight's haunting by the San Diego Chargers. "It was a post. A great throw and a great catch. We had excellent coverage. Ike [Taylor] had an arm between his hands!"

Ike Taylor's memory is equally vivid.

"I had my left arm inside his left arm, and he caught it one-handed, with his right hand, going to his right."

It was Vincent Jackson, 6-5 and 230 pounds, bolting down the middle on Pittsburgh's first defensive series of the playoffs, the fourth play of that AFC Division round game, and Philip (his back to the) Rivers had just executed a standard play fake to Darren Sproles, who curled left out of the Chargers backfield at the Steelers' 41. Downfield, Taylor was matching Jackson stride for stride in full gallop.

Rivers' quick-slung delivery was, as Clark said, simply great, and Jackson's catch even greater. In the endzone, Jackson seemed to pass the ball to himself, taking it from his left hand, around Taylor's, and cradling it in his right as he fell to the wet grass. Taylor turned 180 degrees behind the end line and signaled no catch, because it couldn't have been. Except it surely was.

The Chargers led 7-0, and even though the Steelers would score 28 of the game's next 31 points and go on to win the game and ultimately the Super Bowl, and even though Jackson would catch only one more ball that night for just eight yards, his return tonight carries all kinds of portentous indicators.

He has a chance to become the first San Diego receiver in 27 years -- going back to Wes Chandler -- to string together three consecutive 100-yard plus performances, having just ripped Baltimore for 141 and Miami for 120, when he averaged 24 yards per catch. He and Rivers have the clear capability of throwing the Steelers into a 1-3 ditch. Perhaps most gallingly, Jackson, with almost comedic timing, happens to be the embodiment of what a big rangy wideout that you grab in the second-round ought to look like.

Things have gone a little differently for Limas Sweed, likely a healthy scratch tonight a week after dropping a perfect pass in the endzone that was only the difference between winning and losing to the Bengals. The 53rd player picked and by some accounts the top receiver in the 2008 draft, Sweed has not started an NFL game yet and might be further from it than when he was an underclassman at Texas.

Jackson, the 61st player taken in 2005, started seven times in his second year, and every game since. That's what happens when you get the opportunities to make big plays, and then, you know, you actually make them. Not that Jackson had ever had much of anything made easy for him. He cleaned Super 8's and sold vacuums door-to-door in high school and couldn't even interest Division I-A colleges in his aptitudes, winding up at I-AA Northern Colorado.

Tonight he'll reappear on the Heinz Field lawn as the hottest component of one of the league's most prolific big-play offenses. No NFL team has more pass plays of 25 yards or more than San Diego's nine.

In a secondary hogtied by the absence of Troy Polamalu and strung by consecutive fourth-quarter collapses, confidence was at least said to remain high this week.

"Quite frankly, I don't worry about that," Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said. "This is what you live for. Even when it's bad in this business, it's great. I can't think of anything else I'd rather do. I think members of our secondary feel the same way. I know they'll be chomping at the bit for the challenges of facing a guy the caliber of Philip Rivers. When you do what we do for a living, that's what you love. We've got an extremely dangerous quarterback coming in here who's extremely hot. You like to try to slow those guys down if you can."

Right. Because if Jackson puts up another 100-plus, everyone will be living for a fairly mammoth predicament.

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