Go Hawks, Go!

An amazing event has recently taken place - something that many people imagined only seeing when Hell was good and frozen. The Seattle Seahawks have finally made it to the Final Four in the NFL’s playoff hunt.

Good for them! If they somehow manage to beat the Carolina Panthers this weekend, they’re off to Detroit for Super Bowl 40 (XL). So after 30 years of sucking, the Sea Monkeys are finally winners. And it’s about damn time.

I’ll admit it – I’m a fair weather football fan. I’ll watch it during the playoffs and the Super Bowl (mainly for the commercials and occasional wardrobe malfunction), and that’s about it. During the regular season I’ll turn it on if Seattle is playing, but usually I won’t go out of my way to watch pro football. And college football? Fuggedaboutit. I may be the only hetero male in the Midwest who doesn’t give a crap about college football, but that’s okay. I have better things to do with my life than to sit around and obsess over the Hawkeyes or Huskers or the Cyclones or whichever team is currently responsible for getting all the redneck’s tighty-whities all bunched up.

But I’ve always had a certain fondness for the Seattle Seahawks. Sure, just like their fellow Seattle sports bombers the Mariners, the Seahawks usually leave their fans chanting “wait until next season”. Being a Seattle sports fan though means never being disappointed, because you never allow yourself to believe that there’s a chance they’ll win in the first place. If you don’t set your expectations very high, you can’t be crushed when they inevitably fall apart.

Oh, sure – the Sonics managed to win the NBA championship back when I was 13, and the Mariners have come thisclose to actually going to the World Series a couple of times, but the Seahawks? Their last playoff win (before this season) was way back in 1984, when I was 19.

I remember the game. My friend John and I were listening to the game on the radio while we strung more Christmas lights in my parent’s cherry tree, in an ongoing effort to “out-Clark Grisswald” the guy across the street. Seattle beat the Oakland Raiders that year (we all had “Raider Buster” t-shirts), and as the Seahawks celebrated their victory, John fell out of my Mom’s cherry tree, breaking a couple of branches as he crashed to the ground. (My mother is still pissed about that, 22 years later.)

But since that time, Seattle’s had a lot of years of 8-8 records and distant hope of one day playing for the national championship. I still followed the Seahawks, mainly because they were the lovable losers from my hometown, and living here in the Land of Football, where you’re either a Vikings fan or a Packers fan (with very few other options in between), it was good to stand up for the little guy. Sure, odds are high they’d be out of the playoff picture before Halloween, but someone needed to support the cellar dwellers, right?

But this year, the story is different. Matt Hasselback has been outstanding for the Seahawks, and running back Shawn Alexander is the league’s MVP. So if they do make it to the Super Bowl, they’ll do it with their helmets held up high, and not because of a fluke.

Of course, they need to get past the Panthers this weekend first. And this being Seattle, the Choke Team of the Century, anything is possible.

But I’ll be rooting for them to pull it off, out of a sense of hometown pride and because it’ll irritate Skippy Whitebread and the rest of the football geeks that I work with that “my” team made it to the big dance, and theirs did not. (Although Skippy’s team is the Steelers, so I’m rooting for a Broncos victory in the AFC this weekend, too.)

So go, Seattle! Get out there...and win one for the Gressel.