We could blame the degradation of the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh NFL rivalry on Vince Williams or Vontaze Burfict, Primanti Bros. sammiches or Skyline Chili, The Clarks or Over the Rhine, the Golden Triangle or Fountain Square. Or, we could blame it on Twitter, which surely hasn’t helped.

Whether we believe the mess this rivalry has become is the fault of one side or the other or social media's ability to disseminate inflammatory statements, it's obvious this rivalry has gotten entirely out of hand.

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“I think it can get out of control and it did at times,” Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger told Mark Kaboly of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in an interview published Friday. “I am out there and you see all the stuff going on under the piles. It is one thing to talk a little trash and another thing to say some of the things that are being said. The referees have to keep it under control, but we as players have to be better and go play on both sides.

“I want it to be a good, clean rivalry. I don’t want it to be a rivalry where people are tuning in to see a fight, to see penalties.”

In the wild card playoff game between the two in January, the teams combined for 221 penalty yards, 110 more than their regular-season average. The Steelers were the 10th-least penalized team in the 2015 regular season yards conceded; if they never played the Bengals, they’d have jumped to No. 5. Cincinnati squandered a last-minute lead in a chance to secure its first playoff victory in a quarter century by committing consecutive personal foul penalties to put Pittsburgh in range for a game-winning field goal.

The first of those was a blow by Burfict to the helmet of Steelers star receiver Antonio Brown, which will cost Burfict to miss the first three games of the 2016 season. Teammate Adam "Pacman" Jones, who followed that play by contacting an official and earning the second key penalty, subsequently declared Brown was “faking” his injury. When Brown missed Pittsburgh’s next game in the conference semifinals against Denver, it was obvious he was not.

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Steelers assistant coach Joey Porter was on the field as the Jones penalty was whistled, ostensibly checking on Brown's injury but allegedly talking smack to the Bengals players. His presence in that circumstance led the NFL to a "clarification" regarding its rule against assistant coaches entering the playing surface to deal with injured players. Whether it's a new rule or not, they're calling it the Joey Porter rule.

Pittsburgh linebacker Vince Williams, who seems to tweet more audaciously than he plays, threatened Burfict after a clean sideline tackle against the Steelers’ Le’Veon Bell led to a season-ending injury. “I catch Vontaze on south beach im painting that boi sight,” Williams tweeted. Alas, it was not a singular lapse of reason. When a gorilla had to be killed at the Cincinnati Zoo to protect a young boy who’d fallen into the animal’s enclosure, Williams posted, “That Gorilla was from Cincinnati. I didn’t drop one tear. He in a better place now.”

I’ve lived a combined 50 years in the two cities. I attended probably 10 Steelers-Bengals games in Cincy during the time I lived there. My wife was struck once with a pom-pom by a female Bengals fan angry at her Pittsburgh fandom (and for asking ushers to force the woman to obey the stadium smoking ban). A group of young Bengals fans once poured beer onto my sister-in-law. I’d imagine there are tales of Cincy fans visiting Heinz field who were treated as rudely, or worse.

Pittsburgh and Baltimore have waged a brutal rivalry that essentially carried over from when the Ravens were a Cleveland team, and still it continues. But even though they played twice a year and four times in the playoffs between 2001-15, and even though Haloti Ngata once broke Roethlisberger’s nose with a blow to the head, and even though linebacker Terrell Suggs called that “awesome” in a podcast interview with Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, and even though Steelers coach Mike Tomlin was fined $100,000 for wandering onto the field during a Jacoby Jones kickoff return — and possibility costing the Ravens a touchdown ... they’ve managed to keep their interactions out of the gutter that has swallowed Steelers vs. Bengals.

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Roethlisberger told the Tribune the Ravens games are “as physical as a rivalry and as physical as a football game that you would ever see. Everybody knew that. But it was never dirty. There may have been some pushing and shoving, but that’s just guys. You never worried about cheap and dirty-type stuff.”

On Friday morning, as the Steelers opened their training camp to the public at St. Vincent College in otherwise peaceful Latrobe, Pa., a gentleman showed up wearing a No. 55 Bengals jersey with B-U-R-F-I-C-T across the back shoulders.

That’s as close as Pittsburgh will come to Burfict until mid-December, because he’ll be suspended for their meeting in Week 2 of the 2016 season. Be nice if things will have calmed down by then. It’s time for the rivalry to grow up into something admirable, not abominable.