Most of the 70,823 crowd seemed to favour Seattle, who came into the game as narrow favourites, and their win also means quarterback Sam Darnold completed his redemption story after being written off as a starting NFL quarterback.
The Seahawks are Darnold’s fifth team in his eight-year career – and third in three years – but in his first year in Seattle the former third overall draft pick has won the game’s biggest prize.
The 28-year-old has been haunted by a comment he made as he struggled in a game against the Patriots in 2019, when he said “I’m seeing ghosts”, but Darnold has now exorcised those demons.
Instead, it was Maye who suffered a nightmare when confronted with the fast, physical defence that Durde and coach Macdonald have fashioned in their two seasons together in Seattle.
Such is the breadth and depth of the threat it carries that Devon Witherspoon claimed a sack from cornerback. He, Derick Hall and Rylie Mills only registered 2.5 sacks between them all season but all three got to Maye in the first half.
The Patriots earned only four first downs before the interval and 52 yards in total. Some cruel folks on social media even joked that Bad Bunny gained more yards as he carried a ball during his half-time show.
Hall’s second sack forced a fumble which was recovered by Byron Murphy, who also sacked Maye twice as the Dark Side wrote themselves into Seattle folklore alongside the ‘Legion of Boom’, the defence that led the Seahawks to their previous Super Bowl win in 2014.
“My team-mates and my coaches, they believed in me,” Darnold told NBC.
“Since the first training camp, every single day we came to work. Shout-out to our offensive line for everything they did in the game. But I’ve also got to shout out our defence.
“We did it. It’s been such a special journey with these guys. So much hard work has been out into this and we did it.”
