…hockey’s Stanley Cup was won by a southern US locale that doesn’t even have a real winter.

And, oh yeah: Ex-Sonic Gary Payton finally got an NBA Championship ring.

…Barry Bonds achieved the highly media-hyped feat of tying for second place in one of baseball’s most revered statistics, I watched our slowly-improving Seattle Mariners take on the once-mighty San Diego Padres.

I’d been given some prime seats in the heart of “Area 51,” three rows from the right field fence. If I were gay I’d have enjoyed the many opportunities to peruse Ichiro’s backside.

The game was great. Mariner hitters drove six runs home. Gil Meche pitched seven brilliant innings prior to fading in the eighth, followed by a two-batter disaster for Eddie Guardado, in turn followed by four outs in five batters for new closer J.J. Putz.

Eight seasons into the Safeco Field era, and I’m still unused to the whole “real grass, real sunshine, real baseball” thang. I can’t help but feeling that a major league baseball game ought to take place within a huge but sterile-looking indoor space, where no annoying distractions such as sunny skies, creeping dusk, light breezes, luxurious concessions, or colorful signage divert one’s attention from the purity of the game. (Of course, during the Kingdome era the game’s many purists denounced the tepid spectacle that was indoor baseball on AstroTurf.)

Another aspect of the Safeco experience that differentiates it from the Dome: E-Z egress. Within one minute of the last put-out, I was heading down an escalator and out on lovely First Avenue South. At the Dome, you’d have endured five to ten minutes wandering down the exterior ramps along with scattered dozens of other dejected but expecting-it fans after a quiet spectacle of opposing-team home runs.

…list-O-linx today, shall we? We shall:

• In the news today, the art deco ferry Kalakala finally gets a piece of good news, in the form of official historic status…. Mayor Nickels’s plan for a Boston-like strip-club zone in the Industrial District moves forward, despite the need to preserve the area for industrial employment…. The Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will indeed move to the Seattle Center Snoqualmie Room after all, but not until this fall….
• Christopher Frizzelle’s Stranger essay on the doomed-for-development, 100-year-old building housing Seattle’s most hardcore gay bathhouse is notable for several reasons. Chief among them: The research Frizzelle put into the story, giving a sense of history and continuity to a place known for the most fleeting and anonymous of social encounters.
• Virginia Belle asks Democrats to stand up and take pride in themselves for once.
• I’d already been reading online about the amazing bus-only transit system of Curitiba, Brazil, when Jaime Lerner, the architect and ex-mayor who masterminded the thing, came to Seattle to promote his lessons learned. The Curitiba system can basically be described as like a light rail system, only it uses buses on bus-only road lanes instead of trains on tracks. Seattle already has one “busway,” down the industrial district south of the now-shuttered transit tunnel. Future busways could take the place of the now-aborted monorail project, across from the south end of the existing busway into West Seattle, and up through Elliott Avenue/15th Avenue West into Ballard. Bus-only lanes could be added beside, above, or beneath current streets/bridges, or (even cheaper) rededicated from current auto use. Worth thinking about, at least.
• Remember what I said last week about the ’06 Mariners looking pretty good? Strike that; reverse it.

• Are progressive teachers being witch-hunted by right-wing goon squads?
• My ol’ hometown is located within one of the most populous U.S. counties that doesn’t have a four-year college. That might change one of these years.
• Guess what? Initiative hawker and professional demagogue Tim Eyman’s behaving just like a lying, homophobic bigot.
• Is ex-Seattleite news anchor Lou Dobbs becoming a “mad prophet of the airwaves,” or is it just a big ratings stunt?
• Will right-wing corporate forces soon try to censor the Internet?
• Tom DeLay–out; the system of coordinated corruption of which he was a cog–still in.
• The ought-six Mariners: Looking pretty good, except for the bullpen.
• Daylight Savings Time is back among us, bringing sunsets after 7:30. Damn, it feels good.

…and now Randy Johnson: How come we only hear about local pro athletes’ scandalous behaviors after they’ve been traded away?

…today to legendary sportscaster Curt Gowdy, one of the few TV personalities to have had simultaneous gigs on all three oldtime networks, and one of the hardest-working nonathletes in the sports biz. (In September weekends during the ’60s, Gowdy would call a baseball game on Saturday, immediately fly to another city, and call an American Football League game on Sunday.)

• The NBC coverage so far has, as my fave TV critic Aaron Barnhart calls it, “less fluff, more stuff.” Fewer interminable human-interest profiles of the participants, more footage of them participating. They’re even showing the greatest winter sport of them all, curling, live on CNBC! (Too bad NBC’s HDTV transmission can be so spotty at times, due to excess signal compression.)
• The opening festivity was a mishmosh of Cirque du Soleil-esque pomposity and truly heartfelt symbolism, such as when the Olympic flag was carried in by eight women from around the countries (though you had to have watched the CBC telecast to have learned about some of these women’s intense political activism).
• Two-man luge!
• Did I mention lots of curling in the US coverage? (But strangely enough, almost none on CBC, which farmed that part out to Canadian cable channels which we can’t get down here.)
• The downhill ski courses with painted boundaries, which the skiers have to keep from crossing.
• Women’s hockey.
• Women’s speed skating.
• The incredibly complicated (and therefore funner) new figure skating scoring rules.
• Just enough return-from-gruesome-injury moments to keep from overdoing the shtick.
• Non-USA athletes are winning a lot, and we even get to see it.

…have, of course, their own blog.

Blame the Seahawks’ Super Bowl loss on inept (or even crooked) officiating, if you must. Many have, on sports talk radio and online chat boards.

There, fans have been ranting with levels of invective that might make Ann Coulter blush. But the title of a chat room at sqidly.com/seahawks said it cleanly and simply: WE WUZ ROBBED.

Of course, it was really only a professional sports event. A show. A big, spectacular show, one as American as apple pie and Enron. Given the nation’s current overabundance of cynicism, it’s easy to fantasize about corruption in high places everywhere.

But even if the Seahawks didn’t entirely lose on their own accord, does it really matter?

Was the past autumn and winter’s Hawk-hype all that important in the universal big-big picture?

I say yes.

Sure, there were the silly moments within the whole mania. Such as the “Seahawks Mass” held last Friday evening at St. James Cathedral.

Granted, the mass might have been just one more publicity stunt in a fortnight of publicity stunts, a means for local Catholics to get onto some of that God-plus-football media attention. So what if, as one of the priests at the mass was later quoted on the TV news, “I don’t know if God is necessarily a football fan”? It’s still a good excuse to bring the parishioners together on a less-than-somber occasion, to pray that our heroes entertain us without getting too seriously banged up in the process, and perhaps without getting caught performing un-role-model-like behaviors.

On the Friday afternoon before the mass, the whole city seemed abuzz about the game. Bank tellers and checkout clerks dutifully wore team apparel; team flags and banners abounded, especially downtown during and after the big rally in Westlake Center.

But on Sunday afternoon, the place was as quiet and ghost-town-esque as Christmas morning. Everyone, it seemed, was watching the game, working, or finding some alternate activity to deliberately avoid watching the game. The Capitol Hill bar where I’d watched the previous two Super Bowls was particularly calm; it turned out the owners were holding a private party at their suburban home and had invited most of the bar’s regular patrons. When I went wandering outside at halftime, Broadway and Pine was as quiet and devoid of human activity as I’d ever seen it in the daytime.

That’s part of the social dynamic of pro football, particularly as it played out this year in this town.

The Seahawks’ miracle season was played out in huge public gatherings (the home games) and smaller public parties (the sports bars). The two big rallies the week before the game were free celebrations open to all ages, genders, races, and classes.

But the championship game itself was held, as it always is, on (presumably) neutral turf. Its telecasts are often viewed at private parties and semi-private bar events (reservations recommended).

The result: The Seahawks won in public and lost in private. The fans’ cheers were out in the open; their tears were behind closed doors.

And so the conventional wisdom, the national media, and the Vegas oddsmakers were right, and the veteran and newbie members of Seahawk Nation were sent away with a few tart remarks about how we were lucky to have gotten as far in the playoffs as we did.

Seattle can return to being largely forgotten in the NYC press, except as the butt of stale jokes about (as one pro-Seahawks ESPN commentator said in chiding a pro-Pittsburgh ESPN commentator days before the game) “coffee, rain, and Kurt Cobain.”

But the faithful know better. Had a few penalties and refs’ decisions gone the other way, our city would have had the opportunity to party in the streets, shouting our presence to the world.

The Super Bowl telecast opened with a rewritten version of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! Had our Hawks won, a more appropriate Seuss reading would have been from Horton Hears a Who.
But just wait. One day soon, perhaps this week next year, we’ll get our chance to unite in a rousing cry of “We are here! We are here! We are here!”

Some other pseudo-random thoughts on the game itself, and on the whole show surrounding it:

• After four different commercials with the desperate Bud Light dudes suffering any humiliation just for a beer, I wanted to reach out to them and direct them to the nearest AA meeting.
• What do you know? Mick Jagger can still get his words bleeped at age 62! Either he refuses to go safe and soft, or he’s passed directly from angry young man to bitter old crank without a stop at middle-aged respectability.

The 12th Man flag is back up on the Space Needle (or, as my pal Angelina calls it, the Spice Noodle) after having been taken down Friday night for Windstorm 2006. The pregame hype-athon is already underway. I’m psyched. I’m primed.

My big dream last night: The game’s inexplicably taking place on a Monday afternoon. But I miss most of it because I’d rather see a small intimate concert (at some place like Gallery 1412) by a noted female performance-art star who tells seriocomic monologues, accompanying herself on the cello. It’s a fascinating act, but I leave as soon as I can to catch the fourth quarter. I run to the nearest bar (ok, the nearest bar I like, which in this dream world happens to be in south Wallingford on Lake Union).

By then, the Hawks are behind 7-3; it’s apparently been a dogged defensive battle. But sure enough, our boys come through with a fumble recovery leading to a TD run in the last five minutes. (The refs spot the ball as being down within the five yard line, then our boys stick it in on the subsequent play.) The rest of the game is spent holding the other guys’ offense, a task which seems almost lost when the other guys complete a bomb pass into the red zone. But subsequent pass plays are broken up, including one in which the football lands helplessly on the ground in the end zone. Subdued celebrations commence throughout town, aided by a beautiful, unpredicted, gentle snowfall. (There are even snow flurries back inside the stadium, which in the real world won’t happen at the domed Ford Field.)

(Snow, as some of our longtime readers may know, has always symbolized boyish innocence and unfettered joy to me.)

The dream game’s results, of course, don’t predict the real game’s results. But they do reflect my own attitude.

I’ll watch the game at a WiFi-less bar, so don’t expect blogging-in-progress. I’ll write a big post-mortem later today or early tomorrow.

Windstorm 2006 has died down. The PacNW, or at least those parts of it that didn’t lose electricity this morning, rests impatiently awaiting the big game tomorrow afternoon.

As our gift of hope to you, enjoy these pictures from this past week’s Seahawks rallies, last Sunday at Qwest Field and Friday at Westlake Center.

Go Hawks.

Today’s essay goes out to all my sports-hating, square-hating, mainstream-society-hating good pals on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Despite everything your subculture’s taught you to believe, it’s OK to like football.

Yes, American football.

Yes, that game you’ve hated ever since your dysfunctional public high school ordered you to love it. That game so beloved by the jocks who bullied you and the cheerleaders who ignored you. That game you’ve ever since associated with everything you despise about everybody in America who’s different from you.

As I wrote in this space a month ago, it’s time to stop hating everyone who’s different from you. Way past time, in fact.

Time to learn to see the world through other eyes. To learn new experiences and new passions.

And this week’s Super Bowl can provide a great opportunity to do all that and more.

First: Take a new, different look at the game itself. Appreciate its complexity and its intricacy.

Baseball has been described as a game of control vs. chaos, with the defense in control. American football is a game of order vs. entropy, with the offense on the side of order. The offense, essentially, tries to make things happen; the defense tries to make things not happen.

The highlight reels like to celebrate the achievements of individual stars catching that pass, kicking that long field goal, making that out-of-nowhere tackle. But football’s really a game of precision group choreography. On any given play, each of the 22 players on the field has a role in the execution or the interruption of a preplanned play. If the offense works in sync and everything else works out, points are scored or yards are gained. If the defense is smarter or luckier, points aren’t scored and yards aren’t gained. In no other major US sport is individual prowess less important and cooperative work more important.

And that includes cooperative work among different races, socio-economic classes, and religions. In schools and communities that are truly integrated (not merely desegregated), the football team’s often been one of the first places where different students have learned to work and live together.

(I won’t even hardly mention the role of athletic scholarships in helping a lucky few to rise above their given station in life. Without his, Starbucks mogul Howard Schultz might have never gone to college, and East Coast media know-nothings would have one fewer stereotype to make about Seahawks fans.)

One taboo remains, at least on the field—openly gay players. Today’s pro sports world is more accepting of lesbians than of gay men. I’m sure it’s at least partly due to the old stereotype that gay men are somehow less than fully masculine. That, of course, is just plain silly–in all my years on and near Capitol Hill, many (if most most) of the most macho men I’ve known have been gay.

And I’m sure that, given time and a few brave people, that taboo will also fall.

For now, the game has its share of gay and lesbian fans, who’ll enjoy Sunday’s great spectacle as well as anyone.
As previously mentioned here, I happened to see the Seahaws/Redskins playoff game in a small neighborhood joint with one other man and 13 women, some of whom were making coy little “passes” toward one another during the commercials.

Some of these women were quite vocal about showing off their knowledge of the game—guessing what the next play would/should be, reacting loudly to great game play or lousy officiating. Other women in the group simply enthused over the sights and sounds of the game. They may have preferred the in-person company of other women, but they still got a kick out of seeing big men running and jumping and throwing and crashing into one another and being interviewed afterwards in their undies.

Just as the MSM (“mainstream media” in blogspeak) treat the national political battle as the Republicans vs. those other guys, so have they treated this week’s upcoming football matchup as the Steelers vs. those other guys.

Once again, I’m proud to be one of those other guys.

At the National Review site, Michaek Novak suggests we root for the Steelers in the Super Bowl because their unnamed-by-Novak “opponents” “will be wearing the colors of — hard to comprehend this — Hamas!”

I’d watched the NFC championship game at the Two Bells, which brought in a TV solely for the occasion. I was there with my Belltown Messenger colleagues Alex Mayer and Ronald Holden.

(I’d already stopped by Sport, Seattle’s poshest and Belltown’s only sports bar, for some pregame fan pix.)

After the Seahawks’ lopsided triumph, Alex suggested we all walk down to Pioneer Square to see the after-game celebrations. I’m glad I did. It was a festive, yet family-friendly, all-night party. It eventually extended all the way up First Avenue into Belltown, though by then my camera batteries were shot (memo to self: get fresh battery).

The next game, the game for all the proverbial marbles, will be held, as it is every year, on neutral turf. Even without a home-field stadium audience to spark the party, expect an even bigger celebration with a Hawks victory.

Also expect a huge party outside Sport, where KOMO-TV will stage a postgame show.