SEATTLE — At the end, after all the spilled blood, after all the sapped strength, with football players dropping all over the field, there was a ball in the air, and it was sailing toward the closed end of CenturyLink Field. Sometimes, you can capture a game in a snapshot.
Here was the snapshot.
Here was a ball tumbling out of the frosty sky, out of the deafening din of a thousand Led Zeppelin amplifiers circa 1973, Colin Kaepernick going for broke, going for everything, trying to force the ball to Michael Crabtree and his hands as soft as a Chia Pet.
And here was a Seattle Seahawks player named Richard Sherman, ready to say: Not so fast, kid. Sherman: who’d splendidly said earlier this week, when speaking of the ill feelings between his Hawks and Crabtree’s 49ers, “There’s no love lost. And there’s no love found.”
Sherman: who’d have plenty to say later, getting a paw on the ball, knocking it away from Crabtree. And in that moment there were 68,454 people — give or take a few thousand Niners invaders — who knew what was going to happen before it actually happened, who saw the ball wobble in the air, float ever so invitingly toward the waiting arms of Seattle linebacker Malcolm Smith.
Smith, cradling the ball, then falling in the gunmetal gray end zone, as around him the unbridled joy of the 12th Man — Seattle’s self-anointed amateur helpers, full-throated fans who’d been throwing their voices against the sky for four solid hours — came undone at last. Twenty-two seconds remained, but that was mere trivia.
The Seahawks were going to New York, and soon they would be blaring about little town blues melting away, about vagabond shoes longing to stray, blasting all of that through the P.A., the scoreboard frozen forever at Seattle 23, San Francisco 17.
The city of Pearl Jam and Nirvana, Hendrix and Heart, overtaken at last by the original Jersey Boy, Sinatra, whose boyhood home in Hoboken sits exactly 9 ½ miles from where the Seahawks and the Broncos will compete for the trophy named after an old Fordham man (and St. Cecilia’s of Englewood coach) named Lombardi.
“At the beginning of the year,” said Russell Wilson, the precocious quarterback whose dynamite fourth-down touchdown provided day’s the biggest play, “we said to ourselves, ‘Why not us?’ ”
Terry Bradshaw, the FOX broadcaster standing next to Wilson on the podium, chuckled and said, “Why not?”
“Why not,” Wilson said.
They had embraced this notion that they were in this together, football team and football city, that they’d created this unbreakable and unshakeable home-field juggernaut. Before the game Paul Allen — gajillionaire, co-founder of Microsoft, the man most responsible for keeping the Seahawks from moving from Seattle to SoCal when he bought the team in 1997 — had triumphantly raised a flag celebrating that bond.
Three hours later, as confetti fell and joy reigned and the Seahawks passed the George Halas Trophy around, Allen pointed to the stands and said thank you.
“What an amazing job you did,” he said.
But his team had done something just as astonishing, surviving a football game that might have been as breathtakingly bruising as any in recent memory. This went beyond the simmering tension that exists between the players, and between the coaches, Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh, who’ve been circling each other since Harbaugh was at Stanford and Carroll at USC.
These are black-and-blue teams anyway, hard-hitting, unabashedly violent, and they collided with each other across 60 bone-crushing minutes, getting after each other with such urgency that often it was the tackler who wound up groaning on the ground and the ball carrier who crawled to his knees, hopeful to try again.
There was one gruesome moment — Niners linebacker NaVorro Bowman blowing out his knee while seemingly recovering a fumble (though that’s not how the unreviewable play was called) — and dozens of smaller brutalities, and then the certain star of next Tuesday’s Media Day — Sherman — having his moment in the TV sun.
“Just a fantastic day, the end result of an incredible test between two awfully good football teams,” said Pete Carroll, the Seahawks’ boss (and ex-Jets coach) who in 13 days matches wits with John Fox of Denver (the ex-Giants defensive coordinator). “What a day. What a team.”
They want to be a part of it. And will. And the message is clear to the Broncos: Bring your helmets, bring your pads. And just in case? Bring spares.