PITTSBURGH (AP) -Ten seasons, seven Pro Bowls and maybe one last game.
Few players in Pittsburgh Steelers history have performed as well in a career as Alan Faneca, arguably the NFL's best left guard and a lineman whose personality and work ethic seem a perfect match for the franchise.
Faneca is a team-first player in a sport that has increasingly become me-first, the steadiest of players in an unstable profession where one bad game can ruin a season or a career.
"My agent kept telling me before the (1999) draft he had a feeling I was coming here," Faneca said Thursday. "He kept saying, `I think you're a fit, that's where you're going to go,' and he was right. I think I fit that Steeler mold, I guess."
After a decade with the same team, every game now could be Faneca's last with the Steelers, beginning with their AFC wild-card playoff game against Jacksonville on Saturday night.
The 31-year-old Faneca, for all of his accomplishments, is unsigned past this season and appears to have little chance of returning to Pittsburgh.
With the Steelers seeded only fifth in the AFC field, they can play again at Heinz Field in these playoffs only if they win twice and sixth-seeded Tennessee stages two upset victories.
"Ten years yeah, it's sad, I'll take a moment, man," said Faneca, the player known as Red to his teammates because of his long, flowing red hair. "I'll have to take a moment sometime during the game to enjoy it, and think back when the game's over and I'm the last man on the field, stuff like that.
"You just take it and enjoy it."
Even if this season has been his least favorite.
Faneca felt the Steelers misled him in brief and very unsatisfactory contract talks last winter, so much so he was harshly critical of the Rooney family after reporting for a mandatory minicamp in May.
"This will be my last year as a Pittsburgh Steeler," he said.
Few, if any, Steelers players have been so openly hostile while still playing for the team, and there has been no apparent contract movement for months.
REATT 
