Point: The Seattle Seahawks never should have thrown the ball on that fateful snap year the goal line of last month's Super Bowl.
Counterpoint: If Russell Wilson throws a better ball or Ricardo Lockette is a little more competitive or Malcolm Butler doesn't break on the ball like a five-time All-Pro we're not having this conversation.
Regardless, he didn't, he didn't, and he did, the New England Patriots are the reigning Super Bowl champions and the Seahawks will have to live with the way Super Bowl XLIX ended for as long as they care to remember.
Which, for Pete Carroll, will be a very long time.
“Those kinds of occurrences? They don’t go away. They don’t go away. You just put them somewhere so you can manage them properly. It’s back there,” Carroll told NFL Network (via PFT).
Beyond that, Carroll said, he doesn't want to forget about it. “I’m fueled by it and I always have been and there’s a big part of me that doesn’t want to let it go. I want to make sure that I’m always with it, I always know what happened so I can learn from it,” he said said.
There are two recent examples of teams coming within an arm's reach of the mountaintop only to take a long, bumpy fall back down to the bottom. The Texas Rangers were one strike away (twice!) from winning the 2011 World Series and haven't won a playoff series since, fresh off a last-place finish while facing the prospect of playing the 2015 season without their best player. There's one possibility. Now here's the other: the San Antonio Spurs, a team that came one free throw away (twice!) from winning the 2013 NBA Finals and responded by winning the 2014 NBA Finals in one of the most dominant playoff runs in league history. There's the other.
Unfortunately for the Seahawks, managing last year's disappointment may be the least of their troubles. NFL history indicates Seattle has almost no shot to reach Super Bowl 50 - only two clubs have reached three straight Super Bowls and only the 1972-73 Miami Dolphins won a Super Bowl immediately after losing one the year before.