If the stream-of-consciousness Vegas shenanigans of TJ Simers at the Baseball Winter Meetings can’t bring you some midweek joy, then how about some weekend football dreaming?

Steelers-Ravens. One big bucket of enmity. Bounties. Division title on the line. Yapping galore.

“I’ve heard that the last five years, that they’re supposed to have a bounty on me,” Ward told me recently. “Jamal Lewis, when he was with the Ravens, told me once, ‘There might be a bounty on you.’ You want me to go out there and play any different from the way I normally play? I’m not going to do that. When I go across the middle, they’re going to try to kill me. When I’m blocking downfield, I’m going to try to knock them down. That’s football, and I’m not going to change anything.”

We’d love it if the Baltimore Sun goaded trash-talker supreme Bart Scott into making some “hot sauce”-like comments, but it doesn’t appear as if that will be the case.