Words of Prey, NFC Championship Game: The Seahawks did the thing!

They did it. The Seattle Seahawks did it.

They won the division, they claimed the conference. They slayed the Los Angeles Rams, their own personal horror movie villains, with a top-to-bottom team effort. They reached the franchise’s fourth Super Bowl. More can be accomplished, to be sure, but they have achieved everything a fan could reasonably demand. With style, too.

The Seahawks have reclaimed the lost greatness of the previous decade and sit once again on the precipice of immortality. They’ll take the final plunge in two weeks, hoping to emerge with a piece of hardware better than the George Halas trophy they lifted in front of their fans and their rivals on Sunday night in Seattle. What a time to be a fan.

They did it. And they did it with old-fashioned complementary football. Special teams, offensive firepower, supplemented by defensive precision when it mattered most.

The Seahawks won their fourth NFC crown because they’re the most complete team, a collection of dogs hungry from 1 through 53, covering all three phases. That’s how you win another DVOA title, like in the good old days. By being a complete team.

They did it. Chiefly by way of the back-to-back touchdowns broken up by halftime, the special teams takeaway above, the consecutive clutch defensive plays in their own end zone, and by leaving Matt Stafford 25 seconds and no timeouts to alter the outcome. (Narrator: Stafford did not, in fact, alter the outcome.)

You’ll notice the key plays are spread out across phases and position groups. If you like teams, boy do I have a team for you. Every unit on the field and the sideline won this game. Mike Macdonald’s vision, Klint Kubiak’s plan, Jay Harbaugh’s wizardry brought the plan to fruition, and it took all three of them.

They did it. And now only one doing remains undone. It’s the biggest doing of all and that’s okay. In Santa Clara two weekends hence, the Seahawks will be favored. They might win (probably will) and they might lose (probably won’t); in either case, they did it. They have arrived. With the second-youngest head coach in the league and the fourth-youngest roster, they’ll be camping in January for a while. Get comfortable coming to Seattle and losing, everybody else in football. The seafood’s great.

To arrive, though, Seattle first had to dispatch the horror villain that just won’t die. Down 31-27 in the final three minutes of the wild-card round, the Rams were one misfire away from elimination. Instead they crawled out of the pit and added Carolina to their kill list. They were again on the mat late in Chicago, stunned by the unlikeliest heave this side of Russell Wilson to Luke Willson in a different NFC Championship Game. Ben Johnson opted for overtime instead of the kill shot, Caleb Williams threw an interception where a completion would’ve set up the game-winning kick, and the Rams wriggled out of certain demise, murdered the Bears in cold blood, and lived to stalk a final victim. The main character. You.

And because Sean McVay’s Rambunctious Mountain Goats are uniquely staffed to give the Seahawks fits, that’s exactly how the plot unfolded in the last movie of the trilogy, with a Super Bowl trip on the line. With fits. There the serial killers were, clad in their usual gory blue and yellow, slashing through a defense that had given up 16 points a game to every other team. Stafford and Co. were setting off more explosives than a whole season of the A-Team. LA racked up 221 yards on deep passes — the biggest amount ever for a losing team in the playoffs.

Key word: Losing. Because the Seahawks freakin’ did it. They did it. They stared a Top 5 franchise painful loss in the face and laughed. (They stopped short of taunting it directly, because apparently that’s frowned upon these days.)

Had the Seahawks lost this game, they would still be set up to win profusely for the rest of the decade. Fourth-youngest roster, remember? Thirteen Seattle players started the season under the age of 24. But. They did not lose. They did the thing. They did it.

There was a moment when a loss might’ve planted its seed. You probably know where I’m going here. Riq Woolen, who’d been so, so good for four straight months, was good again at the right time. His pass breakup on 3rd and 12 brought McVay’s punt team out. But wait? There’s a flag.

Taunting. Personal foul. No punt. First down, LA. Very next play, Stafford launches one to Puka Nacua deep, oh shit Woolen’s beat, touchdown. Instead of driving with the ball up 31-20, the Seahawks saw their lead trimmed to four. Those errors flip momentum.

Momentum’s not real though. If it were, the Rams would’ve won last night. They pounced on a mistake, held the Seahawks scoreless on their next drive, and marched down the field, creeping inside the Seattle 10, aiming to take the lead with four minutes left. Indisputably, all the momentum WAS on their side.

Yet LA did not score again. That Nacua grab at the pylon, in the third quarter, represented the final points of their season, which has now ended. You know what is real? Or more specifically, who? Nick Emmanwori, Devon Witherspoon, Sam Darnold and Cooper Kupp. And that JSN guy too, they’re saying very nice things about him.

They did it, with a little help from their friends. A lot of help. Everyone helped. They say to look for the helpers? The Seahawks have 53 of them.

We’ll still get to Predator and Prey, but there was a fair amount of pageantry at a game I was fortunate to attend. The Seahawks know hot to throw a party.

One more win. But they’ve already done it.

PREDATOR

When you score 31 points and win the biggest home playoff game in 11 years, there will be plenty of heroes. Why not start with Devon Witherspoon, who was frankly preyed on all night by Davante Adams, only to turn in two pass breakups to preserve the 31-27 score late. Some amateur All-22 tape for the second play, on fourth and four from the Seattle 6.

PREDATOR

Nick Emmanwori is 21 years old. At the age of 21, he furnished this contribution to his teammates in a conference title game.

As a rookie. Did I mention he’s 21?

PREDATOR

Jaxon Smith-Njigba reminded Puka Nacua who will still be playing next month. A line of 10-153-1, the sneakiest slip route you’ve ever seen, and this one-hander —

— plus two catches that extended key drives. He also found time to draw the defensive holding call inside of three minutes that wounded the horror villain mortally, bleeding out so much clock.

CO-PREDATORS

Dareke Young, the 224-pound ocelot, waiting to pounce on Xavier Smith’s second muffed punt, which Michael Dickson created with 5.4 seconds of hang time. Jake Bobo scored one play later. The Seahawks never looked back.

Special teams did not win this game by themselves. But the Seahawks maybe don’t win it without Young and Dickson.

PREDATOR

Kenneth Walker III, who force-of-willed the first touchdown with three straight bendalicious runs inside the LA 10. Finished with 111 all-purpose yards on 23 touches and two receptions on the first field goal drive. He is RB1.

PREDATORS

The entire Rams passing attack. Those 221 deep passing yards were the third most given up by any defense in any game in the last decade. Staff and his receivers connected for receptions of 44, 23, 21, 40, 29, 35, 34, 23 and 21 yards. Holy moly we’ve never seen a Macdonald defense get abused like that.

Davante Adams and Puka Nacua both scored, Josh Jobe and Witherspoon were on their heels all night, and Riq Woolen was the only corner to look like himself. With all that entails.

PREDATOR

Rashid Shaheed was living rent-free in the Rams special teams so lavishly that they refused to kick off to him and chose touchbacks. They declined to let him return punts, skying them instead. For his trouble, he still flipped the field once anyway, getting behind the defense for 51 yards on the opening drive.

PREDATOR

Cooper Kupp scored the eventual game-deciding touchdown, the night’s 30th point. He kept the chains moving on the final drive, lunging past the marker to pick up 7.1 yards on a third and seven. McVay was left with no choice to burn his final two timeouts. Revenge games are real.

PREDATOR

It is, at long last, Sam Darnold time. Sam the Damn Man, as some called him postgame. Would you like a fun fact? It’s last night’s passer ratings.

Darnold: 127.8

Stafford: 127. 6

There are 50 metrics better than passer rating, but if you come away from this night thinking Darnold dueled to a standstill with the most prolific quarterback in all of football, you’d be ding-ding-ding correct.

Those are the biggest boy throws of big-boy throws. How about a man’s pass chart? Thought you’d never ask.

Darnold made one ill-advised throw total, left one snap in the dirt, and because he threw away successfully on the run each time, he kept his turnovers to zero. The doubters (sheepishly raises hand) are silenced. For the second time against the second best team in the league, the Seahawks needed Sam Darnold to be great. For the second time, he delivered.

PREY

Every fan’s mentals when Woolen committed the taunting penalty. There was an immediate, ominous deflation in the crowd, compounded by Adams’ sudden 47-yard haul. Impossible to guess the score would stay 31-27 until the final whistle. I still don’t quite comprehend it.

Some NFL teams are poverty franchises. Nobody needs to shame them; they know who they are. They’re in the big game once every quarter century, if at all, and spend the rest of their time consistently losing for various structural or cultural reasons.

Most outfits are middle class. These franchises sometimes pop, sometimes flop, and spend much of their existence politely filling out the league’s annual 32-team requirement. Texans, Dolphins, Chargers, Bears, Panthers, Cowboys, things of that nature.

Ah, but some franchises are NFL royalty. As of today, after a decade of plugging along in the middle class, the Seahawks are on the cusp of being recognized everywhere as a true blue-blood again. With one more win, the one awaiting them in Santa Clara next month, they would join the aristocracy again. It is time. The Hawks have gone this far. If they are to go all the way, let us go with them.