Confident that the Ravens will do their namesake's author proud, Poe House curator emeritus Jeff Jerome has made a wager with his counterparts in Boston.

If the Ravens, a team that took its name from one of Poe's most famous works, win Saturday's AFC playoff game, officials with the Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston have agreed to wrap their statue of the famed 19th-century author in a Ravens scarf. In the unlikely event the Patriots win, Jerome has agreed to wrap Baltimore's Poe statue, which sits on the University of Baltimore campus just off Mount Royal Avenue, in a Patriots scarf.

"I'm not concerned at all," says Jerome, the long-time Poe House curator who was laid off by the city when control of the building, in which Poe lived for a few years in the 1830s, was turned over to a non-profit foundation. "We're going to absolutely bury the Patriots. If we had a wall to put them behind, we'd do that, too."

(For anyone who missed the Poe reference above, be sure to read "The Cask of Amontillado.")

The folks in Poe's birthplace of Boston insist they, too, are not worried. "I admire his confidence," says John LaFleur, president of the Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston, which raised money for the statue of Poe that was dedicated near Boston Common in October. "I hope his bravado rings false. We're pretty confident we won't have to place anything over our statue."

Boston, where Poe was born in 1809, and Baltimore, where he died and was buried in 1849, have been battling over Poe supremacy for decades. While Saturday's game will decide who gets to play on toward Super Bowl XLIX, it's doubtful much will be decided about which city has the better claim to Poe.

But at least, given the recent run of cold weather, one statue will be a little warmer once the game is over.