For all the ambivalence New Yorkers may be feeling about the teams in Super Bowl XL, Sunday’s match up between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks is rich with contrast. It’s a culture clash of Rust Belt versus West Coast – and a vibrant illustration of how American life changes.

Admittedly, I do not follow football – at all. But I’m from a small town in West Virginia about 20 minutes from Pittsburgh. It’s a mini-Pittsburgh. There’s a steel mill where lots of Italian, Polish, and Serbian immigrants came to work. Pittsburgh was the closest big city, so that was the destination for theater, shopping, important nights out, summer jobs, and professional sports loyalties.

I’m sure that other regions love their sports teams, too. But what the Steelers have that most teams don’t is an intense link to the community’s main industry. Established in 1933, the team was dubbed the Steelers in 1940 to reflect the city’s dominant product. Which is not a glamorous product. Heavy industry means people work hard (and play hard), which in turn reinforces loyalty and deep-seated identity.

It’s a full-throttle devotion that shows up in the oddest places. The bar room in my grandparents’ house (built in the boom era) features a mural of a shirtless, Atlas-type factory worker bending a giant rod of molten steel with his bare hands. Even the Steelers logo was co-opted from the Steelmark logo that was used as a symbol of the industry. And the last time I checked, that three-diamond symbol – which represents the three elements that are used to make steel – still hung outside the steelworkers credit union, which has nothing to do with the football team. If you ever breathed the (formerly) sooty Pittsburgh air, your lungs are dark with Steelers pride.

But Pittsburgh and the entire Ohio Valley region has changed. With the demise of the American steel industry, the city has moved on to other industries, with medical research and technology leading the way. The once decrepit downtown has been totally remade as an arts district with new theaters, public art, and renovations of old hotels. It’s a cleaner, more beautiful place to be. Pittsburgh is now the home of the Andy Warhol Museum, and its largest private employer is not a steel company but the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Really.

Now, I have never been to Seattle. But I understand that it has given us some universally beloved elements of American life. Microsoft. Starbucks. Grunge music. Slackers. And of course, the Seahawks. Founded in 1976 (right around the time when the Steelers were winning Super Bowls left and right), the team was rescued from oblivion in 1997 by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, who bought the franchise and decided not to move the team.

But the identity of Seattle as the city that defined the culture of disaffected youth and Internet business, is relatively recent. Before it became the birthplace of Nirvana or a haven of environmental activism (Seattle residents bicycle to work more than anyone else in the country), it was a center of brawny American industries.

Settled by Midwesterners, Seattle’s earliest and sustained industry was lumber, though the economy was later enhanced by the gold rush. In 1917, its port was the busiest in the country after New York’s. Hit hard by the depression, the city was back on top when Boeing and the city’s shipyards churned out the vehicles for World War II. Even today, it has the highest concentration of aerospace jobs in the country, as home to Boeing’s manufacturing base. So before you dismiss Seattle as a town full of tree-hugging, coffee-sipping computer geeks, remember that there was muscle in this city, too.

Can that muscle can be flexed sufficiently to hold back the Steelers? Well, considering that the last time I paid attention to this sport was when Terry Bradshaw was playing, I have no idea. But I know which I colors I’m wearing.