PITTSBURGH - A raucous noon-time rally that packed thousands of joyous Steeler fans onto Forbes Avenue today to root on their team just three days before the Super Bowl quickly turned to stunned silence when it was revealed that the Steelers are not really in the Super Bowl after all but that an elaborate practical joke had been played on the entire Pittsburgh region to make us believe they were. The news was greeted by anger, tears and disbelief. A rash of suicides have been reported throughout the region.Five minutes after the rally started, just after Jimmy Pol's Steeler Polka had worked the Terrible Towels into a frenzy, Pittsburgh Police escorted an MTV van through the crowd, pictured above. The crowd grew silent and confused as Ashton Kutcher, host of MTV's Punk'd, a modern-day version of Candid Camera, emerged. A giggling Kutcher took to the stage and announced that the entire city of Pittsburgh had been "Punk'd" -- Denver, not Pittsburgh, really won the AFC Championship, and the Steelers are not in the Super Bowl. Kutcher said that the gag was the brainchild of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writing guru Peter Leo. Kutcher then introduced Jerome Bettis, who emerged smiling from the MTV van to polite, but perplexed, applause. "The Bus" told the crowd that "the joke is on Pittsburgh." The Steelers actually lost to Denver 17-0 "but Pittsburgh never saw the real game," he said. Bettis explained that his two fumbles in that game allowed the Broncos to score two touchdowns "which made all the difference." On top of that, Bettis announced, "I'm not really from Detroit."
Kutcher then chronicled the elaborate steps MTV took to pull off the gag, which is believed to be the most expensive practical joke in history aside from the Kennedy assassinations. In essence, the entire nation was in on it, except Pittsburgh. Every major media outlet fed phony news into the Pittsburgh region for the past ten days. "This obviously was our greatest stunt yet," Kutcher said proudly as the crowd stood in paralyzed, tearful astonishment.
