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| Via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (one of my all-time favorite webcomics) |
I'm a casual sports fan at best. I went through a baseball phase in about seventh grade where I followed the Mariners like crazy and looked at all the stats and watched most of the games, but I think much of that might have been due to the fact that baseball players are cute and wear tight pants and I was thirteen years old.
Though my interest in sports has dwindled over the years, I still watch baseball and football games and count myself a genuine fan of both the Mariners and the Seahawks. So it was with a passing but not insignificant interest that I sat down to watch the Seahawks play the St. Louis Rams two weeks ago to determine who would be the NFC West Champions. (If all that is sports-babble to you, it was a game to determine who would go to the playoffs [win all the playoffs, go to the Super Bowl] -- winner goes on, loser goes home.)
Though both teams had less than stellar win/loss records, the Seahawks were the definite underdogs and were expected to lose. Their playing had been sloppy for the majority of the season, and they were going into this game with six wins and nine losses under their belt. On top of that, they were playing without their star Quarter Back, Matt Hasselbeck, who was recovering from an injury.
It was a tense game, to be sure, but it was evident that the players were given new life by this unlikely opportunity to become division champions despite their poor season. The rookie QB, in only his second start in an NFL game, kept a cool head and didn't let the (immense!) pressure get to him. In the end, they pulled off a 10-point win, beating the Rams 16-6.
Okay, okay, you say. Sure, they won that game and made it into the playoffs. It must have been some kind of a fluke -- and they were clearly playing a team of equal caliber who were probably making mistakes and stuff. They won't last a minute in their first playoff game against last year's Super Bowl champions, the New Orleans Saints.
The thrilling conclusion (and the point of this whole thing) after the jump...
