PHOTO: ABIGAIL DEAN | PITTSBURGH STEELERS

The agonizing struggles of the Steelers’ offense, while difficult to digest, are not unprecedented.

Nor are their potential effects.

Those familiar with Steelers’ history might recall the 1990 season. Joe Walton was new to the offensive coordinator position. He had brought with him a playbook that was massive and he had been insistent upon terminology the players he was coaching found confounding. And the Steelers scored zero offensive touchdowns — doughnut, nada, bupkis — while somehow going 1-3 through their first four games.

“I’m about fixin’ to come unglued,” exasperated quarterback Bubby Brister uttered at one particularly overwhelming juncture.

Fast forward to last Sunday.

Wide receiver Diontae Johnson’s verbal assault on the way a 20-10 loss to Jacksonville had been officiated made the headlines, and justifiably so. But when he wasn’t ripping the zebras Johnson offered a glimpse into the emotional struggle dealing with the Steelers’ continued offensive ineptitude has become.

“A lot of stuff is going through my head,” Johnson admitted. “Like, why we’re not moving the ball, what’s going on? What’s the issue?”

Center Mason Cole picked up on Monday where Johnson had left off on Sunday.

“I think there are times where me, us as an (offensive) line, as an offense, we get hung up on things we didn’t do well, things that happened in the past.”

And the struggles, potentially, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There’s only so much of that any player and any team can take.

And the Steelers, individually and collectively, look and sound like a team that’s about ready to break.

That makes the Thursday Night Football hosting of the Tennessee Titans critical for the sake of their sanity as well as the standings.

They’ve managed nine offensive touchdowns through their first seven games and somehow they’ve still gone 4-3. There’s still more football to be played than has been played to date, so nothing we’ve witnessed pre-Tennessee qualifies as definitive.

But the clock is ticking.

This is a team badly in need of an offensive breakout game, if not against the Titans then a week from Sunday against the Green Bay Packers.

Two or more such efforts in a row would be better.

A third game in which the offense finds a way to massage the ball over the goal line more than once would at least be a start, if not reason enough for everyone to collectively exhale.

Johnson and Cole contend it’s actually the latter that must induce the former.

“We just gotta keep playing, keep believing in one another,” Johnson maintained.

Cole is a big proponent of “focus, attention to detail and playing one play at a time.”

But he also knows that’s much easier said than done when times are this tough.

“The mental part of this game is so much more challenging than people outside of this game understand,” he continued. “It’s easy to dwell on mistakes in the past, things you’ve done wrong, things the offense has done wrong, things we haven’t done well.

“To have that mentality of playing play by play, the next play is the most important, it can be challenging at times. But as professionals we have to be good at that. We have to be able to let things go and play the next play at the highest level of execution.”

And they have to do so immediately, if not sooner.

“We’re coming into a point where we gotta start seeing some improvement in all aspects,” offensive coordinator Matt Canada assessed.

For our sake if not that of the Steelers’ season.

The results have been frustrating, but beyond that the games haven’t even been fun to watch.

If there are many more in store like we’ve seen already, we all might need to join “Unglued Anonymous.”