Seahawks have come a long way since opener against Green Bay

The Seahawks play their final game at CenturyLink Field this season on Sunday against the same opponent they faced in Week 1.

That’s pretty fitting since Seattle’s double-digit victory over Green Bay to start the season was a pretty compelling opening statement regarding the Seahawks’ intentions of repeating as Super Bowl champs.

It’s what happened in the time since Seattle last played the Packers, though, that not only defines this Seahawks season but explains why they are one win away from returning to the Super Bowl.

Week 1 was an unveiling in Seattle, not just of the franchise’s first Super Bowl banner, but of Percy Harvin. He was the player the Seahawks had given up so much to acquire in 2013, the one that underwent hip surgery before he played a single game for the team and made all of one regular-season appearance in his first year in Seattle.

He dropped jaws and broke ankles on that Thursday night opener against Green Bay. He was the wide receiver who outrushed every Packers running back, and the open-field threat who caught seven passes. The Seahawks got him the ball in space, providing a glimpse of the future of Seattle’s offense. And, man, was that future fast.

That was as good as it got for Seattle and Harvin. He was traded four games later before boarding the bus to head to St. Louis, where the Seahawks lost to fall to 3-3.

They’ve been beaten once in the 11 games since then, and on Sunday, they’re a touchdown favorite against that same Green Bay team they opened the season against.

Wait. That’s not quite right. These Packers aren’t the same team. Their run defense is better than it was in Week 1 when Marshawn Lynch rushed for 110 yards in a game where the Packers seemed more reluctant to tackle him with each passing quarter. And while quarterback Aaron Rodgers isn’t running much of anywhere with the torn calf he suffered in Week 17, the Packers’ ground game became more productive behind Eddie Lacy in the second half of the season.

But while the Packers may have evolved over the course of this season, it’s the Seahawks who transformed themselves, which is kind of odd when you think about it. Seattle was the league’s defending champion after all, the one team that could actually say its goal was simply to sustain its level of success from a year ago. And yet it’s the Seahawks whose season has been anything but straightforward.

It can be broken down into three distinct parts, starting with the afterglow. That began with that Week-1 victory over Green Bay when the country watched what a fully operational Harvin would do for Seattle’s offense and let out a collective gasp. That continued on up through the Monday-night victory in Washington when Harvin had three different touchdowns nullified by penalties, and Seattle stood at 3-1 with victories over the Packers and Broncos and no worse for wear after a Week-2 loss in San Diego.

Then came the crossroads to Seattle’s season, a six-game stretch that started with a home loss to Dallas in which Harvin wasn’t on the field for 17 of the team’s fourth-quarter plays. The Seahawks weren’t just beaten, they were outplayed by a team that controlled the ball on the ground in the first half, trusted its quarterback to make a big play late as Tony Romo scrambled to complete a ridiculous throw on third-and-forever, and then held on with the defense.

In other words, Seattle was beaten by a team that played the exact way Pete Carroll wanted his Seahawks to play. Not only that, they were beaten at home.

Five days later, Harvin was traded to the Jets for a draft pick, and the Seahawks began a period in which they wandered the wilderness. They lost in St. Louis after a pair of gutsy special-teams calls by the Rams, they won in Carolina after a three-hour fistfight in which neither team scored 20 points and then had lackluster home victories over the Raiders – who were then winless – and a Giants team that was already cooked.

It was Seattle’s loss in Kansas City that put the Seahawks on the brink, though. A game in which Seattle had three different fourth-quarter possessions needing a touchdown to take the lead. A game in which each of those three possessions resulted in a fourth-down stop, each one further from the end zone than the one preceding.

Seattle was 6-4, and while the playoffs weren’t quite a longshot yet, the Seahawks’ odds of making the postseason certainly weren’t any better than a coin flip.

All the Seahawks did next was allow the fewest points over the final six games of any team since 2000 to erase a three-game deficit to Arizona in the NFC West standings and clinch the conference’s top playoff seed for the second successive year.

And while it helped that linebacker Bobby Wagner returned and strong safety Kam Chancellor got back to making an impact (well, actually it was more like making a dent in opponents), the reason Seattle’s season changed has more to do with the players’ commitment to each other than anything else.

The Seahawks found a way to trust one other again, something that can be traced back to a team meeting the night before a Nov. 23 victory against Arizona that started the winning streak that now has Seattle standing 60 minutes away from a second straight Super Bowl appearance.

And this time when Seattle hosts Green Bay, the storyline isn’t about how far the Seahawks will go with Percy Harvin, but how far this team has come since getting rid of him.

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