As Green Bay and Pittsburgh prepare to face off in Super Bowl XLV this afternoon, one thing is abundantly clear in our little corner of the country — Seahawks fans still aren’t over what happened five years ago.
To most football fans around the country, Super Bowl XL was the first of Pi
ttsburgh’s three Super Bowl appearances in six years, just a small part of an impressive stretch of football. Here in the Pacific Northwest, however, Seahawks fans are still trying to get over the team’s 21-10 Super Bowl loss to the Steelers (and the referees according to most fans, and even former head coach Mike Holmgren).
If it’s true that time heals all wounds, then this one apparently needs more time.
“I hate the Steelers with the heat of 1,000 suns,” said Julie Benjamin, a life-long Seahawks fan who grew up in Mountlake Terrace and now lives in Duvall. “The only thing that will make me feel better is if we someday beat them like they beat us.”
Benjamin, like a lot of Seahawks fans, didn’t feel strongly either way about the Steelers before that fateful day in February five years ago, but is now part of perhaps the most pro-Packer fan base this side of Wisconsin. If you see a lot of green and gold on the streets of western Washington today, it probably has little to do with the Packers, and everything to do with the team they’re playing.
“Everybody here is on that Green Bay bandwagon,” said Phil Andruss of Lynnwood, who is better know to local sports fans as Mr. Mohawk. “We don’t want the Steelers to win another ring. … We were right there, we were on the cusp of winning it. Just the fact that they took the Super Bowl, and we were that close, it was on our finger tips, and they were the team that won it. They’re going to be hated for a long time.”
And to Seahawks fans, it’s not that Pittsburgh was the team that beat Seattle in the Super Bowl, it’s that the Steelers, well, stole the Lombardi Trophy in a lot of people’s opinions. The game featured several questionable calls that went against Seattle, and others that didn’t even qualify as questionable, causing a lot of fans to believe the officials had a big hand in Pittsburgh’s win.
“If they beat you, you’re going to hate them either way, but yeah, when it’s cheap like that, you’ve got a name like the Steelers, and you win it that way, it’s terrible,” Andruss said.
In a poll on Heraldnet.com this week, just over 75 percent of respondents said they were pulling for a Packers victory, a rather lopsided margin considering neither team has an obvious appeal to this area. In a recent ESPN.com poll asking which team’s quarterback fans would rather have playing for them, only the state of Wisconsin was more pro-Aaron Rodgers than Washington. The numbers, the still-heated testimonials from fans, they all point to the fact that, even five years removed from Seattle’s only Super Bowl appearance, the loss still stings.
Cindy Johanns, a Seahawks fan from Everett who now lives in Idaho, wrote in an e-mail that the game was, “An injustice can never truly be undone. … My loath of the Steelers has not and I don’t think will ever subside. Ever since my pastor told me he was from Pittsburgh and is a huge Steeler fan, I find myself dwelling on that while listening to his sermon. I’m looking for a new church to attend.”
That’s right, folks. Five years later, the Steelers are standing between Seahawks fans and their religion.
Seahawks fans would probably still be feeling the sting of Super Bowl XL regardless of what happened this season, but seeing the Steelers play for their third title in six season only pours salt in the still festering wounds. Complicating matters even further is the fact that Bill Leavy, the referee in Super Bowl XL, admitted before the start of the season that he made mistakes in that game.
“It was a tough thing for me,” Leavy said while in Seattle in August as part of a routine meeting to discuss rules changes for the upcoming season. “I kicked two calls in the fourth quarter and I impacted the game, and as an official you never want to do that. It left me with a lot of sleepless nights and I think about it constantly. I’ll go to my grave wishing that I’d been better. I know that I did my best at that time, but it wasn’t good enough. When we make mistakes, you got to step up and own them. It’s something that all officials have to deal with, but unfortunately when you have to deal with it in the Super Bowl it’s difficult.”
That apology provided some comfort for some, but others viewed it as way too little too late.
“What purpose does it serve?” Benjamin said. “None of us can fix it. The Seahawks are still the butt of the league. We’re still the red-headed stepchild. National media treats us like a joke. It’s been going on since the inception of the franchise, and this just made it worse. In a way I wish he’d said nothing.”
And while it seems inconceivable that a league as financially viable as the NFL would risk trashing its credibility to fix a game, the fact that so many Seahawks fans, to this day, believe that happened shows just how hard of a time fans have putting that loss behind them.
Most of the country has long sense moved on from Super Bowl XL. What’s evident leading up to today’s game, however, is that a lot of Seahawks fans have not.
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com.
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