Dieter Kurtenbach: The Bay Area had a winning Super Bowl performance. But so did the Seahawks.

Dieter Kurtenbach, Bay Area News Group on Feb 9, 2026

Published in Football

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — For a week, the narrative took a holiday.

You know the one: the “Doom Loop.” The breathless yelling about a region in decline. A tale of a hellscape of smashed car windows and empty office towers.

The bad actors and cable news pundits have spent years dunking on the San Francisco Bay Area, treating this Pacific paradise like a cautionary tale rather than an American treasure.

But then the NFL circus rolled into town for Super Bowl 60, and the Bay didn’t just fight back; it showed off.

It was a title-worthy week. The logistics clicked (even the 101 cooperated for a bit). The parties hummed at the top of the peninsula and the bottom of the Bay.

And Sunday? That was the mic drop.

It was 67 degrees and sunny at kickoff inside Levi’s Stadium. The light hit the hills just right and bathed the crowd in that specific, golden California glow that usually costs extra.

Yes, it was an incredible ego boost for a region that deserved one. A reminder that this is still an elite place to live — there aren’t many places on earth that can host the world’s biggest party in a light jacket without breaking a sweat, after all.

It was perfect.

Right up until they played the football game.

For the Bay, the good vibes didn’t just evaporate at kickoff; they were strangled a few minutes prior. That’s when Steve Largent, the Seattle Seahawks legend and Hall of Famer, walked onto the field. In a building paid for by the San Francisco 49ers faithful, Largent raised a “12” flag — that cheesy, litigation-inciting Seahawks tradition celebrating their “12th Man” fans — right there on the sideline.

The Pacific Northwest had annexed our lovely region.

We were in for a long one.

Sure enough, like the Bay Area housing market, real estate didn’t come cheap for either offense.

If you like special teams, defensive schemes and the sound of incomplete passes thudding into the turf, this was a masterpiece game.

The New England Patriots, back in the big game but looking utterly bewildered, couldn’t move the ball for three quarters. They ran into a wall of navy blue and garish neon green.

The Seahawks, conversely, didn’t seem all that interested in scoring, either. Their defense-first squad planned to win the game 0 to minus-3 and seemed content to simply exist on offense, waiting for the Patriots to make a mistake. Seattle treated its own end zone like a rumor rather than a realistic destination for New England.

Going into the fourth quarter Sunday, Seattle was up 19-0, and New England had 78 total yards of offense.

And sure, we ended up with a combined 666 total yards of offense in the game. But that was just window dressing. These two teams set the sport back to 1974. I half expected to see someone smoking a cigarette on the sidelines.

The quarterbacks combined for 46-of-81 passing, but you could have convinced me they completed one of every three.

Consider this Super Bowl the pregame for this summer’s World Cup in the Bay: lots of kicks (15 punts!) and the pulsing reggaeton of Bad Bunny.

The entertainment peak from scrimmage might have come not from a play, but from a second-half streaker. Wearing pants (thankfully), but no shirt, he frankly moved the ball better than the Patriots: New England was averaging a paltry 2 yards a play at that point.

Was it great defense or bad offense?

How about both?

And history doesn’t ask “how,” it just asks “how many.”

For the Seahawks, that’s one more. They’re now at two — both coming this century, something the 49ers cannot say of their five titles.

Yes, the 49ers’ top rival performed a defensive showstopper Sunday. It validated everyone who only watched for the commercials. It won’t spawn a thousand highlight reels on TikTok. But it cemented this Seattle unit’s status as one of the NFL’s best defenses — I’d argue the best in the last 15 years, ahead of the “Legion of Boom” that led their first Super Bowl push a dozen years back.

They dominated an opponent on the world’s biggest stage like that neighbor no one really knows dominated the watch-party food spread. New England didn’t score until the game was effectively over. We had to feign excitement for a few minutes in the fourth quarter before Seattle put it away with a 45-yard interception return for a touchdown with a little less than five minutes to play.

As blue-and-green confetti rained down for the champions, littering the field of their bitterest rivals, the sun had long since set. The golden glow was gone, replaced by the harsh light of a scoreboard that showed just how far the Bay’s team has to go to close the gap with its rivals.

Sure, the Bay Area won the week. But the Seahawks won the trophy.

Hopefully, the game was so tough to watch that people will only remember that first victory.