LAKE STEVENS — Bryan Robbins wore a Seahawk head. A foam hat isn’t exactly elegant, but it was just the look for a prospective groom on Super Bowl Sunday.
Because of the big game, Kelly Hayes didn’t expect her boyfriend to make romantic plans for Sunday, even though it was the fourth anniversary of the couple’s first date. “With the Seahawks playing, we made no plans — or so I thought,” she said.
Hayes, 24, and Robbins, 27, live in Lake Stevens, but watched the Super Bowl with friends in Marysville. All through the game, as the Hawks trounced the Broncos 43-8, Robbins kept his secret. He had a blue diamond ring hidden in a glove. It wasn’t just any glove.
A Seahawks season ticket holder, Robbins brought to the Super Bowl party a glove that Hawks safety Kam Chancellor had tossed into the stands at the end of a game at CenturyLink Field. The ring, which Robbins bought last week “on a whim,” was tucked inside the good-luck glove.
“It was spur-of-the-moment,” Robbins said of his decision to propose Sunday. “I realized last week that our four-year anniversary was Groundhog Day. It’s always ‘Let’s see what the groundhog does.’” With the Seahawks in the Super Bowl, he said he decided “I’ve got to go for it.” At a jewelry store, he found one perfect ring.
“It’s absolutely beautiful. It has three stones — the middle one is blue,” said Hayes, describing the white-gold ring she now wears on her left hand. Of course her answer was yes when Robbins got down on one knee — in that Hawks head — at the end of Sunday’s game and asked her to marry him.
“I had no idea. I was very much in shock. And that silly hat, it was perfect,” she said. “I’m super happy.”
Robbins, an auto technology teacher at Meadowdale High School, waited through the game for the right moment.
“I was so nervous,” he said. When the Seahawks scored a safety at the start of the game, “I got a little relief.” After Percy Harvin started the second half with an 87-yard run for a touchdown, “I got calmer and calmer,” he said. Not wanting to jinx the game, Robbins waited for the end.
Hayes, who works as a nanny for one family, was a lukewarm fan of the Seahawks when she met Robbins. “She wasn’t that much into football. But after four years, it’s been rubbing off,” Robbins said. “Now it’s all Seahawks all the way for us,” he added.
Heaven forbid, what if the Seahawks hadn’t been victorious Sunday?
“I didn’t have a backup plan,” Robbins said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with this ring.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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