Drought busters?

Published 9:00 pm Friday, January 13, 2006

SEATTLE – Mike Holmgren was a lanky, dark-haired, 36-year-old quarterbacks coach at Brigham Young University.

Bobby Engram was a shifty playmaker whose biggest fear was getting decked by one of his female cousins.

Matthew Hasselbeck was a blond 9-year-old kid who spent the weekends leading a younger boy named Peyton Manning around the Minnesota Vikings’ locker room.

Rocky Bernard, now a 295-pound defensive tackle, was a 45-pound running back. Lofa Tatupu, now a 23-year-old NFL rookie, was still in diapers.

It was Dec. 22, 1984, and the Seattle Seahawks were – gasp – actually winning a playoff game.

This franchise has been back to the postseason six times since then, yet still hasn’t won another playoff game.

Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald Seattle’s Grant Wistrom (left) and Rocky Bernard celebrate during the Seahawks’ 28-13 victory over Indianapolis on Dec. 24 at Qwest Field.

Twenty-one years. More than 500 players. Twenty-six consecutive days of rain, and yet the drought continues.

“There’s been a lot of talent and a lot of good players come through this organization, so that’s a staggering bit of history,” fullback Mack Strong said, referring to the Seahawks’ inability to win a playoff game since a 13-7 win over the Los Angeles Raiders in Dec. 1984. “But this is a different season, and I don’t think that has any bearing on what we do this season.”

Perhaps not. But a 21-year playoff drought certainly has had a bearing on the long-suffering Seahawks fans’ mood over the years.

Today’s game against the Washington Redskins looks like the Seahawks’ best opportunity to end the frustration. Seattle is coming off its best season in franchise history, has had 13 days of healing time and is hosting the Redskins in a stadium that hasn’t seen the home team lose in more than 12 months.

So this is the year … right?

“It would be huge,” defensive tackle Rocky Bernard said. “The town is really thirsty for a win. We’re kind of like Gatorade, trying to go out there and quench the city’s thirst.”

No NFL city is more thirsty than Seattle.

Cleveland hasn’t won a postseason game since 1994, Kansas City since ‘93. Detroit has a streak of 15 years and counting, while Cincinnati’s goes all the way back to 1990.

Even Houston has won a playoff game in the past 20 years, back when the Oilers beat the New York Jets in 1991 – six years before they moved to Tennessee.

And then there is Seattle, which hasn’t won a game since Ronald Reagan’s presidential term.

His first presidential term.

“A lot of people have been waiting for it for a long time,” said Seahawks cornerback Marcus Trufant, a Tacoma native. “The whole city’s been waiting, everybody on this team has been waiting. A lot of people have been waiting, and I think it would be real big for everybody.”

Trufant couldn’t remember what he was doing in December 1984, just that he was a 4-year-old kid who was too young to even dream of playing in the NFL. But Trufant remembers his teenage years in the Puget Sound area, when it wasn’t exactly cool to root for the Seahawks.

“I would just say it’s a little different now than it was then,” Trufant said. “Everything’s going well for us. Now that we’re in the hunt to do some good things, everybody outside the team is looking at the team a little differently. Everybody wants us to do well, where it wasn’t like that before.”

The signs of a renewed fan base have been all around – everything from the 12th Man flag being raised atop the Space Needle to Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels promoting Jan. 12 as an annual holiday to celebrate Seahawks fans. Tickets to today’s game sold out in 10 minutes this past Monday and by Friday some were up for resale on the internet for four-figure prices.

If 21 years of playoff ineptitude had caused any kind of a crack in the fan base, it’s been filled in this season.

“All around town, it’s crazy,” Bernard said this week. “People I don’t even know are stopping to talk to me. They want it bad. It would be huge for the team, for the organization, just to go out and get the win (today).”

Even-tempered quarterback Matt Hasselbeck has gotten swept up in the hype as well. After saying earlier in the week that this year’s team wasn’t too concerned about history, he was singing a different tune by Wednesday.

“The thing that I’ve learned through the course of this week is that it means a lot to a lot of people,” the quarterback said. “Some of those people are former players here; some of those people are coaches that have been around or people in the building. Or maybe it’s just some of the people from Seattle that have followed the team since 1976.

“It would mean a great deal to them. For that reason to see the kind of support that those people have given our team makes it a little more special if in fact we are able to get it done.”

As a product of Washington State University, center Robbie Tobeck would take a special sense of pride in leading the Seahawks to their first playoff win since 1984.

“That’s why I came here,” he said. “I came here because I believed in what they’re trying to do here and wanted to be a part of it.

“It’s just the fact that I loved this whole Puget Sound area. I love living here, and this is my home. To try to be able to be a part of something big with the Seahawks here, where you want to spend the rest of your life, it would be really special to me.”

When local fans think of the pinnacle of Seahawks football, names like Krieg, Warner and Largent come to mind. The 2005 Seahawks are hoping that a win today will add names like Hasselbeck and Shaun Alexander to the conversation.

“It would be magnificent,” offensive coordinator Gil Haskell said of ending the drought today. “There’s nothing like it. And this city knows football. … This is blue-collar football. They love their game. And we’re getting back to being that team.”