The day started with a Super Bowl party getting canceled because of the weather.
Then Spectrum called reaffirming the news I had already figured out five minutes earlier.
Our cable signal was out in Hawaii Kai.
Just over two hours before the kickoff to Super Bowl LX, Gov. Josh Green told everybody to stay home for the rest of the day because of severe weather that was pounding the islands with wind and rain.
Everything seemed stacked against me, a diehard Seahawks fan from my childhood growing up in Bellevue, Wash., before moving to Hawaii when I was 6 years old.
Then I remembered who the Seahawks were facing at Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco.
Don’t miss out on what’s happening!
Stay in touch with breaking news, as it happens, conveniently in your email inbox. It’s FREE!
I agreed with the sentiment that you couldn’t fault the New England Patriots for the schedule they played.
All they could control were the teams on their schedule.
After finishing the regular season 14-3, the Patriots made it to the Super Bowl as the No. 2 seed in the AFC by beating a Los Angeles Chargers team riddled with injuries on the offensive line, a Houston Texans team that had a quarterback in C.J. Stroud who suddenly didn’t know how to read a defense, and then a Denver Broncos team whose starting quarterback, Bo Nix, was injured on one of the last plays in overtime before advancing to the AFC Championship.
All of the breaks seemed to be going the Patriots’ way, but even as the wind and rain seemed to push my car back and forth in and out of lanes on Kalanianaole Highway as I tried to find a place to watch the game, the Seattle Seahawks weren’t worried one bit.
The best team, winners of the best division in football in the best conference in the NFL, proved the actual Super Bowl was played two weeks ago on Lumen Field when the Seahawks held on to beat the Los Angeles Rams 31-27.
To any football fan with any real knowledge of the game, the two teams that walked off the field feeling completely different emotions on a cold, but sunny, day in Seattle were clearly the best the NFL had to offer.
Super Bowl LX felt more like a crowning moment than an actual toss-up for two teams that shouldn’t have been considered equals on a football field.
The Seahawks, with the NFL’s No. 1 defense and No. 3 scoring offense, were a better team across the board.
There might have been some debate at the quarterback position, where Drake Maye was the runner-up as MVP to the Rams’ Matthew Stafford, but every other position group felt like an advantage in the Seahawks’ direction.
Thank goodness Maye wasn’t named the MVP over Stafford. It would have felt like the NFL Coach of the Year voting, where Mike Vrabel earned the nod over Mike Macdonald for the only reason being that he took a four-win Patriots team to 14 wins.
You might as well call it the NFL turnaround coaching job of the year award. The Seahawks won 10 games last year, so in the minds of clueless voters, that pretty much disqualifies a coach from winning the award, even though the NFL is set up to reward bad teams who turn their seasons around the following year.
Not only do teams with the worse record get a better pick in each round of the NFL Draft, but the way schedules are set up, a team like the Patriots, who finished last in the AFC East last year, can play the worst schedule of anybody the following year and churn out 14 wins.
That’s what made this Super Bowl so interesting to watch. Despite the Seahawks being a 4 1/2-point favorite, it was shocking to hear the number of prognosticators picking the Patriots, whose best win I still can’t figure out, were somehow going to beat a Seahawks team that lost its only three games by a combined nine points.
Seattle had to beat the 49ers and the Rams, two teams with a combined 24 wins in the regular season, twice to reach the Super Bowl. Was there any comparison to beating C.J. Stroud and Jarrett Stidham to reach the grand finale in professional football?
I’m not going to bash Maye too much. As overwhelmed as he was and how terrible he played, the future remains bright for the standout signal-caller.
The real winner of the Super Bowl is Sam Darnold, who on his fifth team in eight years, got to hold the Lombardi Trophy on the NFL’s biggest stage.
Remember this when building a NFL team. Everyone would love to draft that franchise quarterback that ends up being a can’t miss, but don’t count out QBs who struggle with their first team.
Some situations are impossible to win in. New York Jets football fans, who had Darnold, Seahawks DL Leonard Williams, and PK Jason Myers, who scored more points than anyone else this season, know this all too well.
Darnold, surprisingly, was the first USC quarterback to start a game in the Super Bowl. His final numbers, 19-for-38 for 202 yards and a touchdown, won’t smash any record books, but he played the perfect game for what the Seahawks needed.
Not every Super Bowl game is pretty, just like not every day in Hawaii is crystal clear with blue skies and amazing views. I finally ended up in a hotel in what was sold to me as an “ocean view” room that because of the rain, we could never see the sun, but at least it had cable.
For this Seattle Seahawks fan, it was a sunset I will never forget.