I am the Ben Roethlisberger of the blogosphere.

Two days after having surgery to repair an umbilical hernia, I was at Sports Page in White Plains, NY, rooting for the Steelers and feverishly jotting down notes for this column during the Steelers’ 24-13 win over the Cincinnati Bengals.

Hopefully my performance in this column will be better than Roethlisberger’s last season when he came back to play in Jacksonville 10 days after an appendectomy. Thank God for spell check. Too bad there isn’t an interception check for quarterbacks that can stop a bad pass in mid-air and put it back in the quarterback’s hand. Roethlisberger could have used that function on Sunday.

No doubt Roethlisberger’s come a long way from his disastrous 2006 season. What a lot of people forget, however, is that his slide didn’t necessarily start with the motorcycle crash. It started in Super Bowl XL, despite the Steelers’ victory. Unfortunately, Roethlisberger failed to learn a lesson from that game. The Steelers led the Bengals, 21-6 in the third quarter and had a chance to put the game away. They had the ball on third-and-7 at the Bengals’ 11. Then Roethlisberger showed his Favre-like tendencies. Under pressure and with nowhere to throw the ball, he chucked it into the arms of the Bengals’ Deltha O’Neal, and the Bengals drove 88 yards to pull within 21-13 with 13 minutes left in the game.

It was almost a mirror image of a situation in Super Bowl XL, when the Steelers led the Seahawks 14-3 and were deep in Seattle territory in the third quarter. Roethlisberger threw a pass toward the goal line that was snatched by Kelly Herndon. He returned it to the Steelers’ 20, the Seahawks eventually scored a touchdown and were back in the game. Oooh, an eerie parallel just in time for Halloween. Spooky.

Well, the most important parallel is that the Steelers won Super Bowl XL and they won Sunday. Roethlisberger went 19 for 26 against the Bengals with two touchdown passes and that one interception. This is a damn good quarterback. He’s deft at avoiding the pass rush and succeeds most of the time when he’s trying to make something out of nothing, like when he had his foot in the grasp of a Bengals defender but still completed a first-down pass to Santonio Holmes to set up a touchdown.

I hope I can bounce back like Roethlisberger. What? Do I hear some of you saying that despite cheering on the Steelers 48 hours after my surgery, I’m not worthy of calling myself the Ben Roethlisberger of the blogosphere? So I didn’t have 300-pound guys running at me trying to hit me in the belly button. Let me tell you, I was out there despite not being at full strength as a fan.

The place where I ate brunch Sunday was halfway between home and the bar. After eating, I needed a pen to take notes during the game and some Tylenol to ease the pain in my belly button, and both of those were at home. I wasn’t in shape to drive yet, and I couldn’t walk home and double back to the bar in time for kickoff.

If it wasn’t for a last-minute trip to the gas station across the street from the bar, this column might not have been possible. I found the Tylenol no problem, but there were no pens on sale at the cell-block-like convenience store at the gas station.

Fortunately, the guy behind the counter at the store let me have a pen. I was good to go. Across the street I went. In the bathroom, I went to the sink, cupped my hands to hold water (just like on “Survivor”), took my pills and was ready to watch the Steelers.

Of course, the biggest casualty of my compromised condition was the fact that I was only able to drink one beer during the game. I usually have about one per quarter. Maybe the best thing about doing this Web site is that I’m drinking less when I watch the Steelers.

Unlike last week, however, the Steelers didn’t drive me to drink despite the imperfect performance. There’s no downplaying any win on the road against a division opponent. But the Steelers wouldn’t have beaten a decent team playing like that. They had virtually no pass rush. Carson Palmer wasn’t sacked. He might as well have had velvet ropes around him. They’ve had just two sacks in the past two games. The defense had a little bit of a problem getting off the field on third down. The Bengals converted 6 of 11 third-down opportunities. They’d have converted one more if a pass interference penalty was called against safety Anthony Smith, who did interfere with T.J. Houshmandzadeh in the end zone in the first quarter. After that third-and-10 play from the Steelers’ 13, the Bengals settled for a field goal to make it 3-0 just over four minutes into the game.

It always helps, too, when the Bengals show why they’re called the Bungles. On the Steelers’ first touchdown, a 21-yard pass to Hines Ward (another reminder of Super Bowl XL, we again learned to really appreciate the value of Ward), Cincinnati only had 10 players on the field. Then after Roethlisberger’s interception in the third quarter, the Bengals were on their own 30 when Palmer threw deep to Chad Johnson. Ocho-Stinko had the ball in his breadbasket but couldn’t hold on. The Bengals scored on that drive anyway, but they might have had more time to work with if Johnson had caught the ball.

The Patriots and Colts of the world aren’t going to leave 10 men on the field and drop passes like that. The reality is that the Steelers have some work to do to join the ranks of the NFL elite. They’re certainly not going to knock off a team like the Patriots or Colts if Mike Tomlin keeps wasting timeouts with ridiculous challenges. I hear Tomlin just threw the red flag because he wants to review whether or not the Earth is round.

There I go again, finding things to bitch about even in good times. My normal excuse for that is to say that it’s the Red Sox fan in me. But the Red Sox just won their second World Series in four years. There should be no more sky-is-falling mentality in the culture of Red Sox Nation. Maybe I won’t really be happy until I see the Steelers win the Super Bowl again.

But it’s only October. World Series are won in October, not Super Bowls.