PITTSBURGH — The Raiders are not going to win the Super Bowl this season. The Raiders were never going to win the Super Bowl this season.

Please keep those two facts in mind when pondering Sunday’s result here at Heinz Field, where the Steelers were lucky to squeeze just enough catsup out of their offensive bottle and escape with a 38-35 victory that could have easily become an overtime Pittsburgh loss or an overtime Raiders victory.

“For the most part, if you put up 35 points, you should win,” said Raiders coach Jack Del Rio afterward.

But the Raiders did not win, principally because their defense could not stop the Steelers offense — and especially wideout Antonio Brown, who finished with 284 receiving yards and pretty much was his own self-driving vehicle after he caught the ball and ran free through wide-open spaces.

And yet the Raiders still almost won. They are a work in progress that is learning how to do something so improbable. They are trying to figure out how they can win games like this one later in this season or next year. And when viewed through that lens, you’d have to say that Sunday might even be considered a slight step forward rather than any backward collapse.

“I was expecting the unexpected,” said Raiders receiver Michael Crabtree when asked if he thought his team would come here and play one of the more entertaining NFL games of the season.

Some of us were expecting much less. The Steelers are not an awesome team. But they are always tough at home. They have one of the league’s top-tier quarterbacks in Ben Roethlisberger. And their defense hits either hard or harder.

“That’s just something that you know you’re going to get,” said Raiders quarterback Derek Carr, speaking of Pittsburgh’s physicality. “That’s something you get your body ready for in the weight room. It’s something you get mentally ready for.”

The Raiders almost handled it all. They are getting better. But they are not yet good enough to win on a stage like Sunday’s. They have an offense that can rack up points — at least 34 of them for the third straight game — but can have issues when trying to stop the other team.

Sunday, the Raiders also had to overcome a Carr interception on a ball thrown into the end zone (squashing a potential six points) and three lost fumbles, two of them at significant times when the game could have turned.

“If you win the turnover battle, you win the game,” Del Rio said. “We didn’t. I think for the most part, we moved it and ran it pretty well. It seemed like Derek threw a lot of touchdown passes (four). I know we had some balls that were contested balls that they broke up. We typically will catch those.”

You do have to wonder what might have happened if Carr had not thrown his interception at such an inopportune time. There was 4:31 remaining in the game and the Raiders trailing by 35-28.

A touchdown at that point would have tied the score then, rather than tie it up three minutes later, which is what happened when Carr hit Crabtree on a well-conceived 38-yard play.

Maybe that Crabtree touchdown pass could have been a game-winner without the pick on the previous series. Or maybe not. Carr was not going to second-guess himself too much.

“The outcome of that throw, yeah, I’d like to have back,” he said. “They gave us a look that we liked. I tried to throw it in the spot for our guy to make a play. Their guy made the play.”

As it was, the Steelers wound up winning by taking the kickoff following the Crabtree TD and tossing the ball to you-know-who. Brown took a short pass from backup quarterback Landry Jones — who had replaced an injured Roethlisberger — and turned it into a 57-yard play that set up the winning field goal with four seconds remaining.

Even so, a positive step for the Raiders, yes? They fall back to .500 but play five opponents with non-winning records in their final eight games.

“I never think about taking a step or anything like that,” Carr said. “I just try to focus on my job at hand.”

Which is why, during that final minute, Carr was already thinking about overtime, plotting what his first play-call would be on the Raiders’ first offensive possession of the OT.

“I can’t tell you what it was,” Carr said, “but I definitely was. My mind was already there.”

The Raiders are not going to reach the Super Bowl this season. But if they ever do in future seasons, remember what and how Derek Carr was thinking here in Pittsburgh on a Sunday in 2015.

Read Mark Purdy’s blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/purdy. Contact him at mpurdy@mercurynews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/MercPurdy.