The Ravens sent their archrival to a miserable end, overpowering the Steelers with an unstoppable ground game to advance to the divisional round of the playoffs.

Here are five things we learned from the game:

The Ravens hit a new postseason peak in the Lamar Jackson era: The halftime statistics took your breath away: 308 yards for the Ravens, 59 for the Steelers; 19 first downs for Baltimore, two for Pittsburgh; 164 rushing yards for the Ravens, more than anyone but them had amassed in a full game against the Steelers this season.

The scoreboard said 21-0, but that did not capture the totality of the beating they inflicted on an opponent long viewed as living in their heads like some black-and-gold phantasm.

Were the Ravens nervous to begin their march to Super Bowl 59 in New Orleans against a team that had beaten them in eight of their previous 10 matchups? Nah. If anything, they relished this chance to demonstrate their utter superiority.

“They understood how to win in a football game like this,” coach John Harbaugh said after his team had obliterated any lingering questions about its playoff readiness.

That story began, as it usually does, with Jackson. It wasn’t his most absurd statistical performance. His highlights were relatively tame by his standards. But he played within himself while also making it impossible for Pittsburgh’s proud defense to know what was coming next.

“The X factor was Lamar’s unique talents,” Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said. “It seems like every time we got him behind the sticks, he made up for it, or we got him in a possession-down circumstance, and he extended and won those circumstances.”

The Ravens’ magnificent ground game seized center stage because of the quarterback’s uncanny feel for when to keep the ball on a few crucial third downs early in the first quarter. It wasn’t that defenders keyed on Derrick Henry (26 carries, 186 yards) instead of him, Jackson said. It was simply that he played the “cat-and-mouse game” better than the guys trying to stop him.

And then there was Jackson’s touchdown pass to Justice Hill in the waning seconds of the first half, when he seemed to have overplayed his hand by dancing too long. “Hey, throw that thing away,” Harbaugh recalled thinking to himself.

Jackson, of course, knew better. “I just think in his head, he knows what 11 seconds is,” Harbaugh marveled. “He is very much in control.”

The Ravens rolled up 464 yards at a rate of 6.4 per play and owned timed of possession, all without their top wide receiver, Zay Flowers, who was Jackson’s most dynamic target when last they beat Pittsburgh.

Henry, always stronger as the season goes on, has averaged 158 rushing yards over his past four games as the superstar complement Jackson never had in past playoff runs. They’re two Hall of Fame sure things peaking together.

The Ravens’ defense, meanwhile, has not allowed more than 17 points in a game since Dec. 1.

Will any of that scare the Bills or the Chiefs with a Super Bowl trip on the line? No. But the Ravens left no doubts that they’re prepared to slug in that class.

The Ravens raised the running game to the realm of art: Three weeks earlier, the Ravens had blasted through the heart of Pittsburgh’s star-studded defensive front for 220 rushing yards, 63 more than the Steelers surrendered to any other opponent this season.

Offensive coordinator Todd Monken wasted no time revealing his intention to do the same this time around, calling nine runs on a 13-play, 95-yard touchdown drive on their first possession. That wondrous variety included five keepers for Jackson, two of which went for clutch first downs deep in Baltimore territory, and a direct snap to Henry, who blasted 34 yards into the red zone.

The Ravens did it again on a 13-play touchdown drive in the second quarter. All 85 yards of that march came on the ground, with Jackson holding the defense on a string and Henry breaking loose on a sweep the Ravens had set up beautifully with all their work between the tackles.

This was power football as art, and if the Ravens go all the way this year, it will probably be because they do it better than anyone.

Did Harbaugh know his team would seize the day by running 24 times on its first 32 plays?

“I couldn’t sit up here and tell you that 24 out of 32 was the play,” he said. “There’s a lot of people out there happy about that though right now, and when you can do that, you want to do it.”

When Pittsburgh finally discovered its pulse on a touchdown drive early in the third quarter, the Ravens simply went back to the ground to answer, slashing the Steelers with a surprise 15-yard end-around to Steven Sims before Henry charged through the heart of the defense for a 44-yard score.

Three days before the game, Monken said: “It’s hard to control the game if you can’t run the football. Let’s just say that. You control the game with physicality. You control the game with being able to run the football, especially in weather conditions, and it sets everything else up that you do.”

It was as if he had already guessed the nature of the Ravens’ coming victory.

Harbaugh said the beauty of Monken, unsurprisingly a head coach candidate in several NFL cities, is that he’s never locked into one method. The Ravens ran 50 times for 299 yards because that was the best fit on this chilly night.

“We don’t have to do it one certain kind of way,” Harbaugh said. “We don’t have a particular back system that we’re in. We’re not like the West Coast system or something like that. We’re just the Ravens system. What’s the best offense that we can put together for our players at this time?”

It’s no longer so easy to pick on the Ravens’ defensive weaknesses: George Pickens did not play when the Ravens beat the Steelers four days before Christmas. The nightmare scenario fretful fans concocted going into the playoff rematch had Pittsburgh’s best big-play threat victimizing error-prone cornerback Brandon Stephens at a crucial moment.

Instead, Pickens caught one pass for 8 yards in the first half. His most consequential play was a push-off on Marlon Humphrey.

No, this was not going to be about the wounds Pittsburgh could inflict. Instead, it was an all-points declaration of purpose from a defense that was lost through 10 weeks and began, quietly at first, to find itself in an 18-16 loss to the Steelers back in November.

“Start fast. Start really fast. Pummel them early,” defensive tackle Nnamdi Madubuike recalled the team’s leaders saying in the pregame locker room.

In the first half, Pittsburgh ran for all of 19 yards, converted on 1 of 5 third downs and averaged a paltry 3.3 yards per play.

There were highlights, such as safety Ar’Darius Washington’s open-field tackle to stop Pat Freiermuth on third-and-2 in the second quarter. But there was no defining play on par with Washington’s forced fumble near the goal line or Humphrey’s momentum-stealing pick-six in the Ravens’ win over Pittsburgh in December. Instead, they simply took away everything the Steelers wanted to do.

Pittsburgh finally gained some traction by going over the top of Stephens and Tre’Davious White on a 98-yard touchdown drive to pull within 21-7. Russell Wilson later beat rookie Nate Wiggins on a nifty 36-yard touchdown connection with Pickens. So there is still some cause for concern regarding the Ravens’ corners.

However, when tension crept into M&T Bank Stadium with the score 28-14, coordinator Zach Orr’s defense rose again with stops on consecutive drives, one punctuated by Madubuike’s cleverly designed rush on Wilson and the other by Washington’s pass breakup in the end zone.

We all remember the feeling of those fourth quarters early in the season when no Ravens defender seemed able to stick his finger in the dam as double-digit leads vanished. That fragility is gone.

This was one to savor for the Ravens’ offensive line: If nightmare scenario No. 1 was the Steelers picking on Stephens, No. 2 was Pittsburgh’s front seven living in Jackson’s face at the expense of the Ravens’ offensive line.

Instead, the five men charged with protecting Jackson turned this playoff grudge match into their finest moment, an emphatic retort to those critics who said the offensive line would lower the Ravens’ ceiling for 2024.

Coming into the season, no one was sure how Daniel Faalele or Roger Rosengarten or Patrick Mekari would hold up to world-class defenders such as T.J. Watt and Cameron Heyward in a do-or-die game.

Quite well, thanks. That 85-yard, pass-free drive in the second quarter was their road-grading masterpiece.

“I know we were tired. I hope they were tired, too,” center Tyler Linderbaum said, grinning after one of the best games of his career. “That’s a lineman’s dream right there.”

Harbaugh said it was a signature performance for the entire unit.

“Their guys on the edge are just a nightmare to deal with,” he said. “They were crashing the ends off the edge. It was very physical. We were able to control the edges for the run game as much as anything, and how about our tackles in the pass game? It was not like we were chipping all the time when we were passing. I thought our tackles did a great job.”

They kept Watt, Heyward and past Ravens killer Alex Highsmith from unleashing havoc as pass rushers. Highsmith was the only Steeler to register a sack or quarterback hit.

Did these underestimated blockers feel inclined to say they told us so when it was over?

“There’s a lot of outside noise; media and fans say [stuff],” Mekari said. “It’s not something that we are paying attention to. Whether there’s doubt or love or support, it doesn’t affect us. We’ve got a job to do.”

There was plenty of love, with Jackson and Henry going out of their way to laud their protectors.

“I think you build off of it,” Linderbaum said.

This was the launching point the Ravens needed as they try to change their postseason narrative: Coaches and players rejected the notion of the playoffs as a new season, one in which the Ravens might be thrown off stride by thoughts of past failures.

Monken, for example, had said: “We’ve been ascending. This isn’t a new season. This isn’t starting over. It’s just building [from] where we’ve started and where we’ve come.”

Confident words, but just words until the Ravens turned them into action against an opponent that has dragged them into so many weird, ugly, maddening games. Saturday night’s game certainly could have been an occasion for the Ravens to turn skittish and cut out their own legs with penalties, turnovers and special teams snafus.

How many times did we (and they) use the phrase “own worst enemy” in the early part of this season? A few missteps against Steelers and all those old misgivings might have flooded right back into M&T Bank Stadium.

Instead, the Ravens operated from a stance of total confidence. Bad luck never entered the equation.

They had won four games in a row to surge past the Steelers in the AFC North. Analytics such as DVOA said they had the makings of an all-time great team with their historically explosive offense, vastly improved defense and stellar record against playoff teams. No one could question their bona fides as a regular-season titan.

But they needed to do it in the playoffs, with oblivion staring them in the face if they came up small.

The Ravens did not leave the stadium knowing what’s next, though a trip to Buffalo to face the No. 2 seed Bills and Jackson’s potential NFL Most Valuable Player foil, Josh Allen, seemed most likely. That would be a sterner assignment than Pittsburgh, even though the Ravens ran Allen ragged and spanked the Bills by 25 points early in the season.

We’ll have a week to dissect the matchup. What we know after Saturday is that the Ravens have come to this tournament as a fully realized power with a good chance to beat anyone.

Jackson said he wouldn’t be rooting for or against the Bills when they host the Denver Broncos on Sunday afternoon. A trip to Buffalo? A home date against Houston?

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’re ready.”

Have a news tip? Contact Childs Walker at daviwalker@baltsun.com, 410-332-6893 and x.com/ChildsWalker.