DAVID HORSEY
For Seattleites,
a sweet shot at redemption
BY ALEX FRYER
Alex Fryer is a member of The Seattle Times editorial board.
f you believe in karma, it had to be them. Those guys. The players in red and blue with the logo that looks like it belongs to a defunct savings and loan.
Not that folks around here spend too much energy focusing on who is going to lose to the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl LX.
As coach Mike Macdonald famously declared after being asked what he felt about his opponents on the way to the championship: “We did not care! It’s about us!”
Let the record state: We do not care about the New England Patriots. They just happen to be in the Hawks’ way of hoisting another Lombardi Trophy.
But longtime Seattleites and those who bleed navy blue will utter beneath their breath: Actually, we do care. Quite a bit.
We will tell you the disaster on the 1-yard line in the Seahawks-Patriots championship game in 2015 must be finally exorcised.
We’ve tried therapy. Voodoo dolls. Channeling spirits. Players reportedly went to Hawaii after the loss to symbolically toss off a cliff the indelible mental image of then-Hawks quarterback Russell Wilson throwing a last minute, game-losing interception. Still, the shock remains with us, like a lingering bad dream of showing up to work without your pants.
Coach Macdonald, bless him, wasn’t in Seattle back then. Most fans were. And there are some things you never forget.
But that was then. This is now. Bring on the next challenger.
The Seahawks have destiny on their side.
Some teams are favored from the start, front-runners, easy bets from the season opener to the playoffs. This year’s Seahawks were not one of them.
This cobbled-together group — some fresh faces, some wily veterans, led by a quarterback whom no one seemed to want — won the city’s heart the old-fashioned way: winning. Week in and week out, they showed an uncanny ability to function as a true band of brothers on the field, in the locker room, behind the microphones.
They talked about love for each other. And as each white-knuckle game ended in a “W,” the city loved them, too. And now they are one game away from writing a beautiful new history.
Which brings us back to the New England Patriots.
Beyond one unfortunate play, most folks around here don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Patriots. Of course, former quarterback Tom Brady comes to mind.
My wife watched him as a commentator during the NFC Championship Game and remarked: “Oh, he got a haircut.”
She doesn’t notice when I get a haircut. Maybe I should add more egg whites to my diet.
Is it a low blow to recall the scandal around Brady’s deflated footballs and the whiff of cheating? Seems like fair game to me.
There was a time when the whole country was tired of Brady and the Patriots celebrating another Super Bowl win. Every era must end, and mercifully, so did the Patriots’ dominance.
But now they are back. I guess you’ve got to give them credit for that.
Who said recently of the Patriots and owner Robert Kraft?: “Bob Kraft is a friend of mine. I’ve watched that team, and you gotta hand it to him. He had the great team and now he’s got the great team again.”
That would be President Donald Trump.
Kraft sat with the president during the recent premiere of the documentary “Melania.” I’m sure they enjoyed it. In this cordial banter between cities, does that piece of political-sports trivia matter? Let’s not get too divisive. After all, Seattle and Boston have much in common.
Both are port towns. Educated. Lots of hospitals. Bookish. Love public broadcasting and liberal politics.
Our new mayor, Katie Wilson, is often compared with Boston’s Michelle Wu. If she copies Wu’s electoral success, Wilson will be among the most popular Seattle leaders of all time.
There are differences, too. Boston has lobsters, we have Dungeness crab. Boston celebrates a Tea Party, Seattle is the birthplace of gourmet coffee. Beantown has history. We have Soundgarden.
Boston was the setting for 11 seasons of “Cheers.” Seattle got the spinoff “Frasier,” which also had 11 seasons. But if you are keeping score, and of course we are, the “Frasier” reboot on Paramount+ added two more seasons. So there’s that.
It seems like cosmic fate that these cities would once again face each other in the greatest sporting contest of the civilized world.
Seattle and Boston: similar with a twist, like cousins who share an uncanny resemblance.
We will be sure to think fondly of Boston and its impressive team when green and blue confetti falls in Levi’s Stadium like roiling tears of relief.
It will be more than a win. It will be finally waking up after a nightmare.
I can’t wait.
CHRISTOPHER WEYANT
Who says New England doesn’t deserve
another one?
BY JESSE SINGAL
Jesse Singal grew up in the Boston area. He writes the newsletter Singal-Minded and cohosts the podcast Blocked and Reported.
have never had more men on top of me than I did on the evening of Feb. 1, 2015.
That, of course, was the evening of Super Bowl XLIX, the last time the New England Patriots met the Seattle Seahawks on the biggest stage in American sports.
I was watching in Brooklyn with some Pats-fan friends I’d met in college, as well as the usual assortment of non-football-watching weirdos who are unavoidable features of most Super Bowl parties, doing obnoxious things like “socializing” and “discussing the commercials.” But it was easy to ignore them, because we were in for another classic Tom Brady comeback: We were down 10 in the fourth, and then, seemingly a moment later, we were up 4 with 2:02 left.
But then it all seemed to swing back again. The Seahawks’ Russell Wilson lofted a ball down the right sideline to Jermaine Kearse. The cornerback guarding him, an undrafted overachieving rookie named Malcolm Butler, played the ball perfectly, batting it away. Except … Kearse caught it anyway! He got up and was pushed out at the Pats’ 5 . No way that happened. NBC flashed to a replay of the Super Bowl XLII Helmet Catch that spoiled our undefeated year, a replay that, in context, likely generated the single most intense 30 seconds of New Englanders cursing at TVs in our storied history of such.
We all know what happened next, and I’m not trying to rub it in, so I’ll phrase this as diplomatically as possible. Pete Carroll — a super smart coach, a real player’s coach — made a certain decision on second and goal from the Patriots’ 1 (as in one yard away from winning the Super Bowl) that may have been incorrect. A decision that involved human wrecking ball Marshawn Lynch not getting the ball. Carroll instead opted to pass. The ball ended up not in the hands of its intended recipient, Ricardo Lockette, but in Butler’s. It is one of the most remarkable plays in the history of American sports. I just watched it again six times while blasting “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” and shotgunning cans of Sam Adams. It is 11:45 a.m. as I type this.
Back in 2015 in that Brooklyn apartment, that’s when all the men were suddenly on top of me. We were in our early 30s, no mere babes, and yet a certain primal response overrode whatever scraps of respectability we’d acquired over the years. All we knew to do was jump on top of one another and melt into a screaming, crying — yes, there was crying — manpile. The normie party attendees didn’t know what to do. Call the cops? Record it and post it to an unsavory corner of the internet? All I remember, other than the manpile, is waves of relief and disbelief and jubilation.
It was the sort of thing that just doesn’t happen.
I don’t want this to be a column full of cheap slams and parochial New England boosterism. Instead, I want to extend some kind words to our rivals this Super Bowl Sunday. Because when it comes to Seattle, one simply cannot deny that it is, in fact, an American city. A crueler, less open-minded Pats fan would attempt to deny this, but I typed “Seattle” into Google Maps and sure enough, it popped up, a strangely femur-shaped strip of land plopped ill-advisedly in the middle of a bunch of what I assume to be unnamed straits, brackish ponds, and uninhabitable, likely vampire-infested evergreen forests. To learn more, I also looked up the dictionary definition of the word Seattle, and while I don’t quite understand the result I got — a “padded and leather-covered seat for the rider of an animal (such as a horse)” — it only reinforced my belief that, all eyes-and-ears evidence to the contrary, Seattle really does exist.
OK, that’s enough of my bottomless kindness.
I understand there are some hurt feelings over the fact that the Patriots’ rebuild was so short. It doesn’t feel fair that we should be back in the Super Bowl so quickly. But this mentality ignores a few crucial facts. First, Boston is the most important city in the United States and arguably the world. It makes sense that we should win a lot of sports titles. Seattle’s a different story. A historical zig here or zag there and it is a small fishing village, or perhaps a backwater fort that exists solely to keep an eye on the Canadians.
And I don’t know about the “unfairness” of the Pats being back in the Super Bowl when the Seahawks are themselves one of the most successful teams, record-wise, of the last 12 years. They won a Super Bowl! They should have won two! Then they lucked into a terrifying defense and — the final piece — a just-above-average-enough quarterback in Sam Darnold. And Darnold is a Seahawk mostly because of a grand total of two bad games at the end of a 14-3 campaign for the Vikings last year. Things go a bit differently and Seahawks fans are watching some other NFC team in the Super Bowl, furious that a great defense is being squandered on Geno Smith.
So who should get to win the Super Bowl: the region that started it all, where the first shot at Concord was fired, where you can get a decent slice of pizza? Or a city still babbling about how they started grunge, because the story since then has consisted almost entirely of out-of-control housing prices, civil discord, and startups with names like Sniffr: The Canine Social Network? You want unfair? Unfair would be a city that has done so little to pull its weight, that barely even pretends to be a real place — and only engages in such pretending while draped sullenly in dull flannel — winning the Super Bowl.
Is Boston a glamorous place? No. Do we always acquit ourselves with dignity and grace? No. Am I writing this from California, trying to have it both ways by playing the role of the partisan Bostonian while fleeing like hell from the horrors of a Northeast winter? Yes. Did I forget where I was going with this? Also yes!
My point is: Pats 55, Seahawks 0. And you guys will be lucky if it’s even that close.
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