Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- As Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu scored the touchdown that clinched his team’s ticket to Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, Florida, Jason Matthews sat 2,000 miles away in a Seattle bar and pondered his next move.

“I was either going to go to Tampa and be with the fans, and if I couldn’t go there, I was going to go to Pittsburgh and be with my friends,” said Matthews, a 31-year-old software engineer at Nintendo Co.

The day after the Steelers’ Jan. 18 home victory in the American Football Conference championship, he booked a $200 round-trip plane ticket, and asked his boss for Feb. 2 off.

“I didn’t give him the official reason, but he’ll figure it out,” Matthews said.

Displaced Pittsburghers from across the U.S. are heading back to the banks of the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela in the dead of winter to watch the home team on television today, as it plays the Arizona Cardinals for the National Football League championship.

A convention-sized contingent of 2,500 Steelers fans will spend two nights in local hotels and pump about $2.4 million into the economy, according to the Greater Pittsburgh Convention and Visitors bureau. Thousands more will stay with friends and family in and around the city of 312,800.

The bureau is doing its part to swell the pilgrimage with a package called Sixburgh Getaway, named for the team’s chance for an unprecedented sixth Super Bowl victory.

‘Value Season’

The temperature will be as low as 30 degrees (-1 Celsius) in Pittsburgh today, with a wind chill of 20 degrees, according to the Weather Channel Web site. Tampa’s temperature will range from 53 to 69.

“This is what you normally call the value season,” said Joe McGrath, chief executive officer of the Pittsburgh visitors’ bureau.

Three years ago, when the Steelers defeated the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL in Detroit, hotel occupancy in the Pittsburgh area jumped 20 percent, according to Smith Travel Research in Nashville, Tennessee.

At the Pittsburgh Doubletree Hotel, reservations are 10 percent higher than forecast before the Steelers reached the Super Bowl, said Greg Goffin, director of sales.

“We are not seeing the same kind of occupancy as a home game,” Goffin said. “But they are still coming home.”

The recession may push even more fans to forgo Tampa hotel rooms for cheaper ones in Pittsburgh, McGrath said. “They want to have a good time and they want to watch their pennies,” he said.

Terrible Towels

To mark Super Bowl XLIII, the Omni William Penn hotel is discounting rooms by 43 percent to $148 Sunday night.

The tourism bureau’s Sixburgh package includes a $10 gas card for every night a visitor books a hotel room. Visitors bringing a Terrible Towel, the cloth bearing the team’s black- and-gold colors that fans wave at games, can get into the Andy Warhol Museum and the local zoo for free.

Phoenix isn’t in Pittsburgh’s league when it comes to hyping the game to potential visitors. The only mention of it on the Greater Phoenix Convention and Visitors Bureau Web site was a good luck message to the Cardinals, who play in nearby Glendale, Arizona, and are going to the Super Bowl for the first time.

Returning home to watch the Super Bowl on TV is “a unique situation,” said Doug MacKenzie, a spokesman for the Phoenix bureau. The Steelers, New York Giants and New England Patriots may be the only teams to command that kind of loyalty, he said.

Dedicated Fans

The Steelers won four Super Bowls in the 1970s just as the Pittsburgh area’s population was peaking, creating a generation of fans. When the steel industry declined in the 1980s, Pittsburghers left to find better opportunities, taking their allegiance to the team with them.

Steelers fans are among the most dedicated, according to Turnkey Intelligence in Haddonfield, New Jersey. The research firm ranked them second in fan loyalty in U.S. sports, behind only the “Cheeseheads” who follow the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. The Steelers have sold out every home game since Dec. 3, 1972, and attendance at their road games is the best in the league, according to the NFL.

“I don’t know anyone in Pittsburgh who is not a huge Steelers fan,” said Tracy Wolfe, 28, a waitress and Pittsburgh native who planned to drive five hours from Washington for the game.

Mitch Jewell, 22, wore a Steelers jersey every Friday before game day to his job as a software engineer at Microsoft Corp. He says he booked his ticket from Seattle to Pittsburgh right after the AFC championship.

“To have everyone around you in black and gold and celebrating is a completely different feeling,” said Jewell, who graduated from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University last year.

Not everyone understands this kind of dedication, as Matthews, the Nintendo software engineer, discovered on a date last week.

“She thought it was weird,” he said. “So that’s not going to work out.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Matt Townsend in New York mtownsend8@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 1, 2009 12:22 EST