Watching Marshawn Lynch, Who Is Always Falling Forward

Last year's Super Bowl ended with two simultaneous plays. The first happened on the field: a shotgun snap to Russell Wilson, a pivot to the right, a slant, and then Malcolm Butler shooting into the frame like an Aston Martin down a Venice alleyway in a Bond flick. There was disbelief on one sideline, elation on the other, the burnt smell of early ledes evaporating in the press box.

The second play occurred in the mind's eye, somewhere between expectation and imagination. In that one, Wilson handed off to Marshawn Lynch, universally recognized as the premier power back in the game and a man seemingly purpose-built for the task of gaining a champion's final yard. On that play, Lynch breezed, burrowed, or bruised his way into the end zone, and the game came to a more conventionally captivating end. The confetti falls either way, just on a different collection of fragile human heads.

In the days and weeks following the Super Bowl, analysis of that actual, fateful play became a cottage industry for everyone from message-board anonymities to talk show hosts. While the aims varied—some adapted it for mockery and others embarked on deep statistical dives—all were centered on the nearly unbreakable conviction that Lynch would have scored had he gotten the ball. Lynch alone was, at the end of the last game of a long season that had turned on injury and suspension and sudden hot streaks and mysterious cold ones—and, more broadly, on the wild and fraying macro- and micro-collisions of chance and strategy and bodily mass of the NFL—a Sure Thing.

That is how he enters this season as well, with the Seahawks again a contender and the ninth-year back once again the fulcrum of their offense. Lynch's position is a rare one. Outside of the quarterback role, professional football is a game for the young, cheap, and compliant. That Lynch has stayed on top for as long as he has is a reason for pride. More interesting, and maybe more significant, is the way that Lynch has emerged as a different sort of hero. In the face of the league's rhetoric and aesthetic of excess gravity and put-on militarism, he stands out as a kind of corrective, a beacon of enduring humanity in a dehumanizing game.

Running backs are among the NFL's most disposable components, and are just not supposed to have careers like Lynch's. It is easy to forget, now, watching him shoulder out of the grip of a linebacker or blast a hydraulic stiff-arm into some luckless safety's helmet—or evade interviewers' questions with a grumble and a smirk—that Lynch's first few seasons of pro ball were underwhelming. A first-round pick of the Buffalo Bills in the 2007 Draft, Lynch spent three and a half ho-hum seasons in the chill and snow of Western New York, putting up average statistics on forgettable teams.

Add to that a couple legal run-ins and a reputation for surliness, and it was easy to see how things might have ended for Lynch. He could easily have been branded more trouble than he's worth. He could have bounced from team to middling team before washing out of the league altogether. He could have ended up as some enterprising front office's buy-cheap investment, underpaid but publicly thankful for any job at all.

Instead, Buffalo traded him to Seattle, where circumstance smiled a big and bright-grilled smile upon him. The Beast Quake, the 67-yard, seven-tackle-breaking, pupil-dilating, oxygen-enriching, seismograph-registering run in the 2011 Wild Card game against the New Orleans Saints, was only the start of this. Remarkable though it was, it pales in comparison to the full catalog of Lynch's weekly exploits. The absolute tirelessness, the sine-wave cuts. The confluence of strength and tempo, like a clock made of lead pipes. An immunity to wear and injury that seems to owe less to luck or preparation than to some inherent stubbornness, as if by force of personality Lynch can suggest that a lurking ACL tear just take that shit somewhere else.

Lynch seems most fully himself not when he's busting off fifty-plus-yarders but when he's manufacturing a first down along a congested sideline or turning three yards into four with a heartily applied shoulder. It is during those prosaic plays that Lynch advances his violent thesis. Most NFL backs can break a big one now and again; Lynch is one of the few who can make his living in the muck of the middle of an NFL field without seeming to corrode. Play after play, he launches himself into a place designed to sap his strength and separate his body parts from one another, and afterward hops up unscathed and seemingly quite worry-free.

Of course, this will all come to an end sometime. Lynch's apparent immunity to the rigors of running the football is an illusion; the punishment and attrition are non-negotiable. Lynch has not avoided the ball carrier's inevitable second act so much as he has merely prolonged the first. That second act could be two more glorious years of piston-legged cutbacks away, or it could start Sunday afternoon, when the Seahawks open their year against the Rams in St. Louis, and Lynch is suddenly without some essential portion of speed that simply left him over the summer.

Whenever it happens, when Lynch enters the quick and quiet process by which the megawatt NFL replaces its burnt-out filaments, the game will lose a measure of something already in short supply. We all know too well, by this point, that football requires of its players not just endurance but sacrifice; that every week features individual games and more important contests against the inevitable pain of the game itself. We know, too, that not much of this ends happily. Rosters do not turn over in the span of two seasons because everyone decided to go into real estate. Lynch is one of the few who can make the game's violence look temporary, its harms passing. He makes football look like nothing but a game. It is a lie, and it is a gift.