SEAHAWKS REDEMPTION (AND CHEESE FOR ALL)

Libby K. Hanaway
3 days ago
12 min read

Updated: 8 hours ago

Last Sunday’s Super Bowl LX — that epic battle between two hotly-contested, intensively-analyzed halftime shows — also featured an encore Super Bowl meet-up between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. For non-allied fans, it’s fair to say the actual game was a bit of a snooze: a low-drama, dominating defensive show that smothered much of football's snappy pass-and-run action.

But in Seattle and within its loyal legion of 12s across the country, no one was snoozing during the game; they were all wide awake, tightly focused and chewing fingernails until the game clock safely ran out. Nevermind that the Seahawks seemed to have the trophy in hand for much of the game; this was a wounded, haunted, pessimistic fan base that had been stewing in the sulky, salty waters of Puget Sound for the past eleven years. Downtrodden. Depressed. Deeply distrusting. They did not dare to hope.

Libby — are you being a little over-dramatic here? Are you “emoting,” as your dad liked to say?

I am not. Ask any Seahawks fan about the final 24 seconds of 2015's Super Bowl XLIX, and be prepared to:

a.) duck and take cover

and/or

b.) hand them a box of Kleenex and let them talk it out ... or let them sit alone in stony silence. It’s hard to know how they’ll respond in advance, so just be flexible.

Libby — do you know this pain from personal experience? Were you a wounded Seahawks fan?

Me? Oh no, I’ve been totally fine. But I WITNESSED this pain in many friends, in the wider Seattle sports-fan community, and, most memorably, in our own household with Rick and E. They felt the deep stab of sports agony, and I could see from close observation that the pain was sharply acute and destined to become chronic.

If you watched or heard about the actual Super Bowl game this year, you know that Seattle did pull it off ( 🥳), but you might not know why it meant so very much to Seahawks fans worldwide (or — in the context of this website — why it was so so GOOD). Their big win becomes an even bigger win — a monumentally redemptive win — with the backstory in place. So today, I’ll give you the origins of Seattle’s collective 11-year bad mood from one family’s perspective … which was just one family of many Seahawks-fan families experiencing their own Super Bowl dramas that night in February. I love both an origin story and a redemption story, and this is both.

Backing up: it's mid-January 2015. The Seattle Seahawks have just clinched their spot in Super Bowl 49 against the New England Patriots. Region-wide euphoria! Jubilant, swaggery talk of back-to-back Super Bowl victories, even whispered hopes of a dynasty. Plus, with the Patriots and their evil-empire aura, local fans knew the entire nation would be rooting for the Seahawks. The sun was shining in Seattle!

Sometime in this buzzy stretch, my sister Cheri called with some fun news: they had four free Southwest Airline tickets due to expire and would it be okay if they came to visit us in Seattle over Super Bowl weekend? Now, for any non-Super Bowl weekend, I’d not hesitate to say YeS 💯🤗💯, but as someone who instantly calculates every possible contingency to every possible situation, a knowing voice inside me said, “Oh, this could be a disaster.” But out loud, I heard myself saying, “Sure!”

I hesitated in my mind because the Seahawks — and their performance in that year’s Super Bowl — had taken on an outsized meaning for E, and, by extension, for Rick. I say “hesitated,” but it was more like wildly-flashing warning signals streaking through my brain. E was midway through a hellacious health-issues-and-more senior year of high school, and the Seahawks and our dog, Goldie, were among the few steady, sturdy constants in her life. She LOVED the Seahawks and was as loyal a 12 as one could be. That team was her team: unfiltered Richard Sherman, quietly "Beast Mode" Marshawn Lynch, speedy Tyler Lockett, do-right Russell Wilson, and pep-talker Pete Carroll. She had even been on the Century Link field a few months before the Super Bowl, performing with her dance team at an October halftime, but that was just a lucky bonus. The main driver was a deep, abiding connection to their grit, their competitiveness, their peculiar mix of personalities, their culture, and their collective roar.

As for Rick, he’s always been a sports fan — mainly the Cubs and the Bears at the professional level — but at the start of our Seattle years, he adopted the Seahawks and also the Sonics (before their traitorous 2008 sale to new ownership in Oklahoma City, which was the other main Seattle sports tragedy; Rick still has a green t-shirt that says “Bring Them Back”). Rick dreamed of becoming a sports announcer as a kid, delivering Cubs' game highlights in his boyhood bedroom; now he lives a smaller version of this dream while standing three feet from our TV and commentating (with outstanding accuracy, I should add) during any big game. He's even been able to pursue his sports-fan passion as a dad: Rick and C do live music together / Rick and E do sports:

So okay: Rick and E = deep, true sports fans. Now we're back to Super Bowl 2015:

Our house is full, game time is upon us, and I have some concerns. I suspected E’s stress would be stratospheric on this day, and it was; whatever the fallout, it would be on semi-public display (which is the beauty of family — they accept and love us at our best and worst). Misgivings aside, we were FESTIVE: blue and green balloons festooning the fireplace, the Seahawks “I'M IN!” cardboard sign taped to the mantle, Chex Mix filling the bowls, and burgers prepped for grilling right after the game.

Though C does not care about football, she sported her Seahawks socks, and Rick wore his blue-and-green Seahawks pullover (that he kept and wore again last Sunday). My sister, brother-in-law, early-teen niece, and their 6th-grade family friend were scattered throughout the room with us. Their young friend, new to us and visiting for the semester from Hawaii, was an open-air surfer girl who had likely never seen a televised football game in her life. This could be interesting, I thought.

The game itself was a classically-stressful back-and-forth: we're down, we're tied, we're down, we're up, we're UP 💃🕺!! But late in the 4th, the Patriots score to take the lead, 28-24. All the air and fun evaporate from the room. But WAIT!! With two minutes to go, the Seahawks start taking it down the field; they methodically march forward and are ready, with 24 seconds left, to spectacularly, unbelievably score from the one-yard line — and dramatically win the Super Bowl 🏆!! The stadium is LIT up. Our room is LIT up (from a photo at 7:11 pm: niece is standing with her hand on her head, everyone else is leaning toward the TV from chairs, from the couch, from nearly up against the TV). This was actually incredible! Run it in, Marshawn! And then the unthinkable — and inexplicable — happens:

NOTE: I am in Texas with E as I write this post. She just heard the audio of the original (and unavailable for sharing) NFL clip while sitting on the floor reading an issue of Real Simple from 2020. She asks without looking up: "Why are you replaying the worst moment of my life?" So maybe even now, the wound has not fully healed.

After that fateful, fatal, doomed-for-sports-history pass call, within the next hour and a half, all of the following occurred (with permission to share from all primary participants):

In the seconds following the Patriots' interception, Em goes pale and silent, with stunned, bitter tears filling and then spilling from her eyes. Rick, after apoplectically yelling at the TV (at Pete? At Russ? At the universe?), leans over to hug her, a tender sports-bonded father-daughter moment that — unbeknownst to us until last week — younger sis C captured on her phone, Snapchatting it to who knows how many friends and breezily captioning it: "she's crying #$&%."

NOTE: When C included a screenshot of this previously-secret Snapchat pic in a family text thread celebrating last week's big win, I thought, "Oh no, here we go again; we will be right back in the brutal gameday pit of our Sammamish, WA family room." But surprise! E responded with darkly funny memes and included it in her own Instagram story, captioned: "Took 11 years, but tonight is the start of my healing journey 💙💚💙💚. (Thank you C for documenting a low moment in my life and keeping it hidden until today 🥴)". Family growth!

Back to the post-game family room: Like a crack photojournalist spotting breaking news, I snap a pic of the high drama from the back of the room; we're still at 7:11 pm like the previous photo, which just goes to show how much can change within a single minute of both sports and life. Rick is bent down, side-arm hugging E; Cheri stands behind the couch, absorbing the room's emotion as a fellow mom; Dan watches the post-game on-screen reaction with an "Oh, boy 😬" look on his face; our niece is using her phone, probably texting someone "S.O.S."; family-friend K is grimacing sympathetically (also a signal for S.O.S.?), and C is looking directly at me like this:

Then E silently rises from the couch and runs upstairs to continue her tears in the privacy of her bedroom, letting out her frustrations of the game but maybe all the frustrations of her life, too. Rick quickly retreats to the kitchen, and the remaining six of us sit there, looking at each other in the thick, awkward tension that followed a football game: Do we laugh? Do we cry? Do we talk at a normal volume or keep it at a whisper? And most urgently, how do we transition to dinner?

By the time we gathered ourselves, Rick was already outside grilling the burgers, standing alone in a cold, dark rain that matched his spirit. Then comes the most vivid moment of our drama. We had cheese slices pre-plated on the counter, anticipating their warm, melted hamburgered gooeyness; when I ask who'd like some on their burgers, Rick quickly and infamously interjected: "Nope, cheese is for winners."

First off, if you don't already know, Rick is the most relaxed, level-headed, funny, friendly, good-natured human on the planet; the scale of his reaction sparked instant cognitive confusion, and once again the remaining six of us had to decide whether to uncomfortably laugh or go along with this humorless new version of Rick. It was, it turned out, no laughing matter: banning cheese seemed to be the most immediate, instinctive, socially-acceptable (but was it?) way to channel his frustration.

NOTE: I always considered Rick's cheese statement to be a random verbal grasping in the wake of discombobulated fury, but in my reporting this week, I asked about his thinking in this moment. He said he must have been moodily riffing on the then-airing Flo from Progressive "Sprinkles Are for Winners," commercial, and thus was born the legendary Rick variation 🧀 🍔 🧀. Thanks, Flo!

Rick brought the uncheesed burgers inside, and C quietly decorated one on a crumbly gluten-free bun, a cautious sisterly offering to leave outside E's bedroom door.

After dinner (what did we even talk about?), we tried another transition, this time to an early celebration of our niece's 14th birthday. Earlier in the day — when everything was bright and hopeful — we spelled her name in M&Ms on a homemade Texas Sheet Cake. The photos show we lit the candles and sang "Happy Birthday" at 9:26 p.m., and I have no visual confirmation that E had recovered by then. Until last Sunday, it was not clear if she ever really had.

Our family's high drama played out to greater or lesser degrees in bars and family rooms across the Pacific Northwest that night, and that game has haunted fans season after season after season. Even so, Seahawks supporters — including Rick and E — did not abandon their beleagured team. The following year, our whole family — including Rick's visiting mom — attended a Seattle University-sponsored talk about resilience between Penn grit researcher Angela Duckworth and the Seahawks' can-do head coach Pete Carroll (who, despite not-doing in that key SB moment, still led with his trademark positive energy). And in 2017, Rick and E took a dad-daughter tour of Century Link Field, allowing Rick the chance to fake-take hostile questions at a pretend press conference.

E's car has sported a Seattle Seahawks license plate holder deep in Dallas Cowboys' country for over eight years, and even our old Goldie-Girl was in on the action. When Rick won a Seahawks rug in a raffle, Goldie found her new favorite (though temporary bc aesthetic issues — sorry, G) spot in the sun.

It's important to know that fans — including Goldie — stuck by while licking their wounds/paws for eleven years straight, until the Seahawks fatefully — and more dominantly — met up with the Patriots once again last Sunday.

A few things remained familiar: the forest and sea colors on the field, the seismically-loud fan base, the voice and tweets of Richard Sherman, now an analyst for Amazon Prime Video. But many things were different, too, with new players and new stories including:

Sam Darnold, the QB passed on to his 5th professional team in March 2025, famously believing in himself when most did not. "Those who know Darnold well say he isn't motivated to prove the haters wrong, but to prove his teammates and family right."
Outside linebacker Derick Hall, born 23 weeks premature with no heartbeat, stepping in to support teammate Byron Murphy II, whose daughter was born three months premature in October, weighing just 2 pounds, 5 ounces. With a less-than 1% chance of survival, Hall's entire life story has been about beating the odds. Murphy's daughter is doing the same, having left the NICU at Christmastime weighing a beautifully chunky nine pounds.

The quietly powerful leadership of owner Jody Allen, the "invisible architect" behind the Seahawks' recent transformation.

Head coach Mike Macdonald, adopting Pete Carroll's focus on team culture and expanding via an alphabet of acronyms its definitions of connectedness, communication, mission focus, and love for one another.

And afterward: Entire Reddit threads analyzing the selflessness of this Championship Seahawks team: "Is this not the most Humble team in NFL history?"; "zero main character energy"; "every single player answered interview questions directed towards them, with an answer that wasn't about them and focused on the team."

🚨 For anyone reading this post who is not currently aligned with a particular NFL team: Are you wanting to root for this Seahawks team now, too? I, myself — a vague football fan at best — am invested.

This time around, when the Seahawks ran onto the field, we had a different family configuration. As soon as the Seahawks' Super Bowl spot had been secured, Rick surprised E by announcing he'd fly on Sunday morning to Texas to watch the game together in the calm privacy of her apartment. They bought Skittles in honor of Marshawn Lynch, Rick wore his quarter-zip Seahawks pullover from 2015, and together they healed in the wake of victory. C went to a Denver-area SB party after work and I walked down the street to a neighbor's event (but returned home after halftime because even I bore secondhand scars from 2015). Cheri, Dan, and more of their family — including our birthday niece and her now-newlywed husband — cheered from Minnesota. We were all in different locations and life phases, but we remembered our shared night of football loss and cheeseless burgers. [I do not have an update on their family-friend from Hawaii, but it would not surprise me if she never watched another down of football again. We wish you well in your sunny paradise life, surfer-girl K!]

Victory — apart but still together — was sweet and redemptive.

Immediately following that pivotal 2015 Seahawks loss, "Cheese is for Winners" became an embedded family catch-phrase; the benefit of sharing both good times and bad with others is that more people can be in on the story ... or the joke, as the case may be. Many of us now automatically blurt out, "Cheese is for Winners" in any sort of non-tragic loss (sports or otherwise) ... and conversely, and more favorably, with most wins. To memorialize this landmark statement, many years ago another niece made Rick a little Cricut-ed sign, now warped with time and taped to his office wall:

The sign will still hang as a testimony of pain, suffering, loss, and endurance, but thankfully we have a new ending. And now, Rick, we also — finally — have cheese:

Congratulations to the Seahawks and to persevering Seahawks fans everywhere!!

💙 🧀 💚

EXTRA GOOD

ALSO LINKED THROUGH THE EXTRA GOOD PAGE HERE

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2026

1._GOOD IDEAS AND INFORMATION: Happy to present this important (and uncomfortably entertaining) PSA in honor of American Heart Month ... and also as a timely nod to heart-centric Valentine's Day ❤️.

The day after Christmas, I was telling my sister, nieces, and anyone within earshot the somewhat-chaotic story — briefly mentioned here — of slicing open my hand and needing stitches three days prior. Cheri said, "This reminds me of that Elizabeth Banks video — the heart attack one? Have you seen it?" I had not, so she dialed up the info-comedy short on YouTube and we all gathered around her phone to watch. Released in 2012, it captures the dizzying, circus-y carry-on / push-through pace of many women and effectively communicates the more subtle, easy-to-downplay signs of heart disease and heart emergencies in women, too. You'll probably be like 😅😬😅 with recognition of your own pace ... or the pace of someone you love.

With a couldn't-be-better title — "Just a Little Heart Attack" — I bet it's saved a lot of lives ❤️‍🩹.