Seahawks. Patriots. Sunday. And the one place on the Space Coast built for a night like this.
Some games end. Some games haunt.
Super Bowl LX kicks off this Sunday at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California — 6:30 PM ET on NBC, Telemundo, and Peacock — and the matchup is enough to make even casual fans sit up straight. The Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots are meeting again on football’s biggest stage. Eleven years after their first collision ended on the most debated play call in NFL history.
On Merritt Island, Wise Guys Pizzeria is doing what it does best: building a spread fit for the occasion. But we’ll get to that. First, you need to understand why this game matters — and why the ghosts of 2015 are everywhere.
Rewind. February 1, 2015. University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Arizona. Super Bowl XLIX.
The Seahawks, defending champions and the most fearsome defensive unit in a generation, had the ball at the 1-yard line. Second-and-goal. Twenty seconds left. Marshawn Lynch — Beast Mode himself — was in the backfield. Seattle trailed 28–24. A single yard stood between them and back-to-back titles.
Offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell called a pass.
Russell Wilson fired a slant to Ricardo Lockette. Malcolm Butler, an undrafted rookie cornerback from West Alabama, jumped the route. Interception. Game over. Patriots 28, Seahawks 24. Tom Brady had thrown four touchdowns. Butler had thrown his body into football immortality.
For New England, the play reignited a dynasty. Three titles in the next five years followed. For Seattle, it was a fracture line. The Legion of Boom — that fearsome secondary that had dismantled Peyton Manning in the previous Super Bowl — never fully recovered. Careers diverged. Egos clashed. The window closed.
Butler would later tell reporters that he recognized Seattle’s formation because he’d practiced against that exact play earlier in the week — and failed the first time. He corrected his footwork. He studied the alignment. When the moment came on the game’s final drive, his body knew what his mind had already rehearsed.
“I ain’t never seen a group of grown men cry like that after I caught that ball,” Butler told PEOPLE and Yahoo Sports.
He wasn’t talking about the Seahawks. He was talking about his own teammates.
The feelings never really went away in Seattle.
Before this season’s divisional round playoff game against San Francisco, former Seahawks wide receiver Doug Baldwin raised the 12 flag at Lumen Field. It was supposed to be a celebration. It became something more.
“Cathartic,” Baldwin told Sports Illustrated, describing the moment. The feelings of “a missed opportunity” are still there. Four thousand and three days later, and counting. “I don’t hold it against Pete or Bev anymore,” Baldwin said. “Like, we all make decisions we wish we could have back.”
The old guard flooded the tunnel before that playoff win — Michael Bennett, Lofa Tatupu, Ken Hamlin, Marshawn Lynch, Matt Hasselbeck. Former legends who built something extraordinary and watched it come undone in twenty seconds on a February night in the desert.
Multiple former Seahawks players described the rematch bringing old feelings “bubbling up to the surface.” This isn’t just a game for Seattle. It’s an exorcism.
These are not the same teams. Not even close. But the echoes of 2015 are impossible to ignore.
Seattle’s Seahawks (14–3, NFC’s top seed) are led by second-year head coach Mike Macdonald, whose defense features five players with 12 or more quarterback hits this season. Linebacker Ernest Jones led the team with 126 tackles and 5 interceptions, earning second-team All-Pro honors. Punter Michael Dickson averaged 49.9 yards per punt, the sixth-longest average in the league. This is a complete, physical football team.
And at quarterback? Sam Darnold. Not Russell Wilson. Darnold, the former third-overall pick who wandered through the Jets and Panthers before a breakout campaign with the Minnesota Vikings, signed with Seattle as a free agent after Geno Smith was traded to the Las Vegas Raiders. It’s a resurrection story — a quarterback the league had written off, now starting in the Super Bowl.
When asked if he’d throw from the 1-yard line, Coach Macdonald didn’t flinch. “Is Beast Mode available?” he quipped to Sports Illustrated. The ghost of that play lives in every room in that building.
On the other sideline, the New England Patriots (14–3, AFC’s second seed) are making their record twelfth Super Bowl appearance, chasing an unprecedented seventh title. First-year head coach Mike Vrabel — himself a former Patriots linebacker — has built this team in the image of what he knew. Quarterback Drake Maye, who has absorbed 15 sacks this postseason, is the new face of the franchise. He is not Tom Brady. Nobody is. But he doesn’t have to be.
The connective tissue to 2015 runs through offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, who held the same role during Super Bowl XLIX. McDaniels is one of only three people involved in both matchups — alongside Seahawks general manager John Schneider and equipment manager Erik Kennedy. Brady himself endorsed the reunion: “Josh is second to none,” he told Sports Illustrated. “He has great vision for an offense. He’s a great teacher.”
This is the third consecutive Super Bowl that is a rematch — Kansas City and Philadelphia met in both LVIII and LIX — but this one carries a weight the others didn’t. This one has a scar.
And now: the part where you need to know where you’re watching this thing.
At 117 East Merritt Avenue, Mike Altro — New York born, Italian roots deep as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway — has been feeding the Space Coast from his corner of Merritt Island for years. Wise Guys Pizzeria, “Home of the Original Goodfellas,” isn’t the kind of place that needs to manufacture a game day atmosphere. It just is one. New York-style pies. Jumbo wings in twelve flavors. The kind of food that turns a couch into a stadium and a living room into a locker room.
For Super Bowl Sunday, Wise Guys is open 11 AM to 9 PM and rolling out a lineup built for watch parties, not individual meals. These are community platters — feeds for the crew, the family, the neighbors who show up with nothing but opinions and an appetite:
Two 16″ 2-Topping Pizzas & 50 Jumbo Wings (12 flavors) — $90 Two 12″ Philly Cheesesteaks & 50 Jumbo Wings (12 flavors) — $70 Two 18″ 2-Topping Pizzas & 100 Jumbo Wings (12 flavors) — $135
Pre-order before February 8th and take 10% off. Call 321.305.4055 or order online at WiseGuy.Pizza.
Here’s the truth about Super Bowls: the football is the excuse. The gathering is the point.
Whether Seattle finally gets its redemption or New England extends the longest winning legacy in football history, Sunday night is about the room you’re in and the people beside you. It’s about the moment after the play — the roar, the groan, the argument over the call that lasts longer than the game itself.
Some things don’t change. The pizza is hot. The wings come in twelve flavors. And the best seat in the house is the one surrounded by people you’d go to war with on a Sunday night.
Wise Guys Pizzeria. 117 East Merritt Avenue, Merritt Island. Super Bowl Sunday. Be there.
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321.305.4055