Yesterdays game went down just like we all thought, but not at all how we all thought.
  • Seattle Seahawks
  • Yesterday’s game went down just like we all thought, but not at all how we all thought.

Much as we here at The Stranger predicted, the Seahawks are headed back to the Super Bowl after fending off Aaron Rodgers and the Packers for a 28-22 win (we said 30-24, but who cares). Much as we didn’t predict: everything that actually happened in the game.

The penultimate game of the Insufferable Journey to Rewinnining the Super Bowl descended all the way into the Heart of Darkness. We stared down the fiery pits of Mordor. Marlon Brando told us about the horror. Darth Vader is our father and then our hand got cut off. It was really bad. Seriously, is Richard Sherman’s arm okay?

But then we won. And then we cried and laughed, and it’s silly that a game made us feel everything that game made us feel, but we felt it. And the win meant more because of the journey.

Having looked at the replays and the film of the game, our instant analysis is that the Seahawks are heroes made of magic, and they deserved winning more than Green Bay in the mind of whatever capricious fate/demigod decides the outcome of American football games. So rather than break down the unbreakdownable, instead let’s rank our Seahawks heroes in order of insufferable greatness:

Numero Uno: Marshawn Lynch, who had 183 total yards and a touchdown on 26 touches in a game that he was almost held out of because he wanted to wear awesome gold shoes. That a day like that felt par for the course for Lynch is beyond absurd; in all the madness of yesterday, Lynch just went out and put together a standard Marshawn Lynch Hall of Fame caliber performance with a solid crotch grab to boot. If there were any meaningful takeaways from Sunday’s madness, it’s that Lynch can’t leave. He must not leave.

1: Middlebury alum, Dan Savage crush, and onside-kick maestro Steven Hauschka, who made zero field goals but did provide a beautiful chipped onside kick that gave the Seahawks a chance to win a game they had already lost minutes earlier. Also, he survived a hug from Kam Chancellor.

Impressive stuff.

Also 1: Canadian quarterpunter Jon Ryan, whose fake field goal touchdown pass meant that his passer rating for the NFC Championship Game was better than Aaron Rodgers’s and Russell Wilson’s combined.

One: Reserve lineman Gary Gilliam, who caught the fake punt touchdown. Nice when your backup offensive lineman was a tight end in college.

A: Always furious wide receiver Doug Baldwin, whose six catches for 106 yards included a big third-down catch early in overtime that must not be forgotten. Baldwin also dropped what could have been a huge play earlier in the game and was terrible returning kicks. Did he let this prevent him from being great? No. Also I just learned he’s angry that people say he’s angry all the time. Perfect.

A+: Totally unknown wide receiver Chris Matthews, who left his post at MSNBC to recover an onside kick. Two quick Chris Matthews facts: Chris Matthews has zero career NFL catches, and also he is a hero.

The Best: Quarterback Russell Wilson, who had the best and worst footballing performance of his life on Sunday. Four picks? Twelve first-half passing yards? The worst. An inexplicable two-yard Hail Mary on a two-point conversion? A 35-yard overtime touchdown pass on an audible that he called? The best. I can’t rationally analyze his performance. Wilson is made of magic, and that’s good because he plays for our football team.

2: Local boy turned goat turned GOAT Jermaine Kearse had the worst footballing performance of anyone in NFL history (maybe) until the last play of the game, when he made as big a play as any Seahawk has ever made. His first four targets were picked off. I’m 99 percent sure that’s unprecedented in any NFL game, much less a conference championship. His fifth target fell incomplete. His sixth was a 35-yard touchdown in overtime to complete the most absurd comeback in the NFL play-offs in 20 years. Sure, why not?

A (Spelled Eh): Canadian baseball prospect turned dubstep star turned EDM legend Luke Willson, who brought out some of his old hits with a couple of ugly drops before catching the zaniest two-point conversion this side of Boise State. Legend. Hero. Daft Punk.

Christmas: Michael “Black Santa” Bennett, who celebrated the win by repping Portland, riding a bike around the stadium. Weird, but I like it.

Also the Best: Richard Sherman and Earl Thomas, who both suffered massive injuries but kept playing against the best quarterback in the league, holding him to three post-massive-injury points. Sherman tackled Jordy Nelson at the end of regulation with a dislocated elbow to force Mason Crosby to kick a longer field goal to force overtime. The amount of pain Sherman must have felt in that moment is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, and he suffered it so that someone had to kick a ball from a yard or two closer to the edge of his range. Unbelievable.

But Seriously the Best: Pete Carroll coached the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday, and it made all the difference. Packers head coach Mike McCarthy made 8 to 10 decisions that I was grateful for as a Seahawks fan. That’s an unconscionable failure of in-game tactics from an oft-underrated head coach. Pete Carroll, meanwhile, had the deck stacked against him. His offensive line was being destroyed. None of his wide receivers were drafted. He was facing down the league’s presumptive MVP. And his team kept violating his first rule of winning football games: Don’t turn the ball over. If I were Pete Carroll, I would have melted down.

I am not Pete Carroll.

That the Seahawks played like they did at the end of a game that they had, at the worst moment depending on your metric, a 3.2 to .1 percent chance of winning, speaks to what Pete Carroll has brought to the Seahawks organization.

And now Pete Carroll gets a chance to travel into his own personal Heart of Darkness, and face down the team that exiled him from the NFL 15 years ago. Seahawks, Patriots, Super Bowl. Just like we all thought, but not at all how we all thought. I am so insufferably excited to see how this ends.