Any questions?
Feb 3, 2014, 7:39 AM | Updated: 8:17 am
(AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Seattle, as medium-sized cities go, has more than its share.
Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Macklemore, the lakes, the ocean, snow-capped mountains, a Space Needle, a waterfront Ferris wheel, and it’s the most distant city from Washington, D.C. of any city in the lower 48.
But sometimes you want to have it all, plus a Super Bowl victory.
Especially a Super Bowl victory that happens the way this one did.
It came from a team with a third-round quarter back who was supposedly too short, and whose 2013 salary is less than Peyton Manning makes for one game; a team whose ace-in-the hole Percy Harvin spent most of the season injured, whose most valuable player Malcolm Smith was unknown even to a lot of Seattle fans and whose coach, according to the experts, was just too mellow to win a Super Bowl.
And I like to think I planted the idea of a blowout in the coach’s head because two weeks before the game, I told him, “I’m looking for the kind of game where you know (the team will win) by the first half and I can just watch you run up the score.”
Replied Coach Carroll, “You’ve got to toughen up a little bit, dude. You can’t want this thing to be so easy. You want the tension, you want the excitement, you want the build up.”
Well, it was a blowout – a game with no asterisks involving horrible weather, or bad calls. A blowout against the NFL’s number one quarterback, by the NFL’s new number one quarterback Russel Wilson, who told a story he’s told many times. “My dad used to always tell me, he’d tap me and say ‘Russ, why not you?’ So I told the guys, why not us?”
So now there will be a celebration and a huge parade and then: the hard part.
Because all the no-name players are now stars, and the winning coaching philosophy will be copied. And there’s no more playing under the radar.
Now this team is the establishment. And now that they’ve achieved this great thing, you know that there’s going to be someone hungrier out there saying “why not us.”