Announcer: Hey Michael Bennett! You and the Seattle Seahawks just won the NFC Championship Game! What do you plan to do now?
Michael Bennett: I'm gonna ride my bike!

Apparently it was a bike cop's bike. He just took it. He said when you go to the Super Bowl in Seattle you get to do what you want, and that's pretty much right. 

The game yesterday was the craziest, most unbelievable, most beautiful game I‘ve ever seen. I can’t remember a great team looking so bad for 55 minutes and so invincible for six. Everyone today in Seattle feels like they just won something. We‘re all hoisting Oscars aloft. We all want to thank our parents, and God, and Marshawn Lynch.  

I grew up in Minneapolis and became a football fan in the early 1970s when Fran Tarkenton led the Minnesota Vikings. That was a great team that lost three Super Bowls in four years but the toughest loss from was the year we didn’t go to the Super Bowl, 1975, when we lost in the first round to the Dallas Cowboys and the “Hail Mary” pass from Roger Staubach to Drew Pearson. No flag? What was that orange thing flying across the screen? (Turns out it was an orange peel.) But surely, surely, offensive interference. Nope. Nothing. Just stunned silence. Just an awful emptiness inside. I remember afterwards walking down 54th street in the cold and dim light of late December to Salk Drugs and just staring at the candy counter, and hearing some guy nonchalantly mentioning the Vikings loss, like it was no big deal, and hating, hating, hating. 

I stopped watching football before I graduated high school in 1981 (the Super Bowl now and again) but I‘ve been keeping track of the Seahawks this year. To me, yesterday’s game, the impossble come-from-behind victory, almost had the feeling of catharsis.

LINKS:

• Grantland: Packers-Seahawks Go Full WTF in NFC Championship Game
• The KIRO radio call of the final play of the game (NSFW)
• The postgame Seattle Times article
• Jayson Jenks on the emotions of the game
• Richard Sherman's injury? Apparently the ulnar nerve. But he says he'll play in the Super Bowl