The Russell Wilson Era

"Remember when" is the lowest form of conversation.

— Tony Soprano

Nothing's so morbid as nostalgia. Nothing cheapens now like constantly comparing the hot instantaneous to the baby blue confabulations of the past. Now Seahawks fans are luckier than most to have been so cursed, blighted, beaten up, and deprived. Entering the 2013 season, the twin peaks of Seahawks fandom were Laura and Maddy: massacred by an inhuman monster (the Raiders playing "Bob") in the 1983 AFC Championship Game and suspiciously wrapped by plot convenience in Super Bowl XL. This legacy is an acquired taste. Very Seattle.

There's no anchor in the past to cheapen by comparison the future, no perfect season or Steel Curtain Defense, no Bill Walsh, Bart Starr, no moldering glory days to haunt this franchise. I've a friend who relates with grief the day his voice changed. His life is a series of irretrievable losses. Say what you will about a Kurt Cobain childhood, it smothers nostalgia in the crib. Seahawks fans are optimists. Seahawks fans are futurists. They haven't a choice. First quarter in the roll or last in the pocket, this next will be their high score.

But a few years ago, during the ruinous transition from Mike Holmgren to Jim L. Mora, from the 16 megapixel photos of pinpoint slants and off-tackle run blocking as delicate as ballet to another early morning sprint up Tiger Mountain, from passing glory teased but never quite achieved to the mortal threat of incompetence with tenure.

A screaming comes across the sky

— Thomas Pynchon

Named Russell Wilson. First, though ...

A friend of the devil is a friend of mine

— The Grateful Dead

During the winter of 2009, the Seahawks cleaned house, disposing both what was dear (Matt Hasselbeck, Lofa Tatupu, and Walter Jones) and what had rotted deep in the crisper drawer (Jim L. Mora, Tim Ruskell's stuff). For the second time in his role as team owner, Paul Allen put a dent in that towering vat of gold doubloons he swims in and spits out, all artfully (arcfully even) from his yellow duckbill and hired a big, fancy, high name-value head coach. This time it was Pete Carroll. Someone described Allen and Carroll's arrangement as Allen providing Carroll with a golden parachute. Impending and soon to be very severe sanctions were hanging over Carroll's former employer, the USC athletics program. A promotion and a pay raise is a nice way to jump ship. It's ridiculous how little I care about that today and yet how funny it still is.

Carroll developed a highly specialized defense, Carroll redacted those clauses in the Seahawks player acquisition manual which emphasized duty, rectitude, and Christianity, and scribbled in talent, talent, and talent.

But the team didn't really take off. It finished 2010 7–9 with an improbable and spirited playoff run. It finished 2011 7–9 with one Tarvaris Jackson starting at quarterback. (Two Tarvaris Jacksons, standing too close, are known to cause a singularity.) Carroll had stumbled into the same trap of their own making defensive-minded head coaches so often stumble into: he could build a great defense, but because of that great defense, his teams were too good to finish with a bad enough record to select a franchise quarterback. And, it seemed, his talent evaluation was not keen enough to find that franchise quarterback by some other means. See: every quarterback pre-Wilson.

This is hardly a new story. Since the turn of the millennium, 11 of the 14 Super Bowl champions have been defense-first teams. And those teams were all gifted an improbable talent at quarterback. Tom Brady was a sixth-round pick. Ben Roethlisberger and Joe Flacco were selected at 11 and 18, respectively. New York landed Eli Manning after Manning refused to play in San Diego. (That trade, by the by, landed the Chargers Philip Rivers, Shawne Merriman, and Nate Kaeding.) The Tampa Bay Bucs traded two first-round picks, two second-round...