Seahawks Show Character With 4th-Quarter Drive

Players had scarcely departed the field following Seattle’s 24-21 win over Cincinnati in the Kingdome on Sunday when people rushed out to tear down the goal posts.

A big win, eh?

Well, not exactly that big.

Those people were members of the maintenance crew and they needed to fold up the football field in a hurry to prepare for today’s Mariners game.

And although few cities will stage parades for their boys when they defeat the likes of the Cincinnati Bengals, the small crowd in the Kingdome stayed until the end and saw an exciting game.

“The first win’s nice,” said head coach Dennis Erickson after sweating out his first NFL victory. “But we’re not satisfied with one win, obviously, so we’ve got to just continue to get better. Which this football team will do. It’s got a lot of character.”

That all remains to be seen, of course. But remember, previous Seahawk teams have lost to worse Bengal squads. And in this one, Seattle seemed to finally iron out a few unsightly wrinkles.

Such as how the game plan should be set up so that quarterback Rick Mirer can be successful in it.

And such as how Chris Warren needs to be given enough carries from the tailback position to make the play-action passes effective.

One series particularly impressed Erickson.

After Mirer was intercepted for a touchdown early in the fourth quarter, the Hawks’ lead withered to three, Instead, but Mirer led Seattle 69 yards for a touchdown

that provided enough cushion to weather a Bengal rally.

“I thought the drive we scored on after Rick’s interception for a touchdown told a lot about this football team,” Erickson said. “Because it would have been very easy after that to lose momentum, lose some of the things we had (going), but Rick made some great plays down there. To me, that’s growth.”

Mirer, who has admirably shouldered the blame after two lackluster losing performances, sensed that growth, as well.

“We bounced back and (the Seahawks) believed in me and we rammed it right down (the Bengals’) throat,” he said. “Now, we start our streak in the other direction. There’s big pressure off us now, getting that first win.”

But will it stifle the boos that the Hawks have drawn even from their fans at home?

“It’ll silence a few people for a while, but people will always have their opinions,” Mirer said.

Those opinions, presented in the various media, have rankled many Seahawks.

“It made my gut turn,” rookie tight end Christian Fauria said of criticism by some television gel-head. “For everyone to agree that we were bad made me very ticked off. It got the other guys mad, too. But we showed them today. Today was the first step in becoming a great team.”

Hold on there eager rookie. As Erickson points out, this team has a long way to go.

But there appears to be at least a core of strong support, as the skimpy crowd of less than 40,000 raised the noise level in the dome to as high as it’s been in several seasons.

Despite the improvement in so many areas, the Seahawks almost lost this one anyway. Bengal Doug Pelfrey had a chance to send it into overtime. But so many Seahawks anxiously inhaled so fiercely at once as the kick took off, they might have created enough of a wind vortex to suck the ball wide of the upright.

A loss would have sent them into their bye week with an 0-3 record, leaving them to face even more of the kind of comments that turned Fauria’s stomach.

“We looked at this as an important game,” Hawk cornerback Corey Harris said. “But not a make-orbreak-a-season kind of game. We had the bye week coming up and we wanted to try to start a roll before the bye week. This is our first goal as a team that we’ve set and accomplished.”

Consider it a baby step. Those, too, are important.

A great scene from an old Woody Allen movie once captured this sense of how even small things - such as a win over Cincinnati - can assume significant relevance to those who have gone without.

In the scene, a demented, old Russian man carried around a tiny patch of turf, maybe a foot square. Showing it to Allen, he said something to the effect that: “I know it’s not much, but it’s mine; Some day, I hope to build on it.”

So it is with the Seahawks’ win on Sunday.

It’s not much, but it’s all they have.

And it is something upon which they hope to build.

, DataTimes