XL-Sized Egg Laid by Seattle

OK, Seahawks, you got your wish.

You wanted to be acknowledged as more than just an afterthought?

Here’s the truth: Super Bowl XL was about the Seahawks. It was about their blunders, their bad breaks, their inability to win a game that should have belonged to them but instead will go down as Pittsburgh 21, Seattle 10.

“[The Steelers] played well,” Seattle receiver Bobby Engram said. “You have to give them credit. But I don’t think we played up to our full potential.”

What an awful admission to have to make. On the biggest stage American sports can offer, a moment the city of Seattle had waited 30 years to embrace, they didn’t do their best.

If you look at the game itself, that was the story.

It wasn’t Pittsburgh running back Jerome Bettis, whose main moments came in the pregame, when the Steelers let him run onto the field alone, and in the postgame, when he announced that he was retiring. He didn’t even play in the first quarter, and although he gained 43 yards in the game, the guy whose job is to pick up first downs and touchdowns moved the chains only once.

It wasn’t Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who hit the pause button on any “next great QB” talk with a 22.6 quarterback rating in the Super Bowl.

Coach Bill Cowher isn’t the story, but he is the epilogue. This championship should secure a place in Canton for him -- if they can fit the chin on his bust through the door. While Cowher won’t match the four-championship total of his predecessor, Chuck Noll, he has as many as new Hall of Fame inductee John Madden and has a superior regular-season winning percentage to Noll (.632 to .572). Unlike Madden and Noll, Cowher has managed to keep the Steelers winning in the free-agency era.

“He doesn’t deviate from his game plan at all,” Bettis said. “That’s why consistently, year in and year out, you get the same type of football team, a tough-minded, physical, hard-nosed football team. I think we reflect our coach’s character.”

Pittsburgh won this game with two long touchdowns -- a 75-yard run by Willie Parker and a 43-yard toss from receiver Antwaan Randle El to Hines Ward.

Seattle lost it with a steady accumulation of mistakes that collected like the snow outside Ford Field.

The Seahawks controlled the game in the first half. Controlled it everywhere except the scoreboard. The Seahawks gained more yards and won the turnover battle, yet it was the Steelers who held a 7-3 lead at halftime.

Touchdown- and first-down-costing penalties, dropped passes and a poorly managed two-minute drill that ended with a missed field-goal try all threw salt in Seattle’s game.

“I felt like we kept getting a rhythm, getting the momentum, we kept getting them on their heels,” center Robbie Tobeck said. “There were so many times I thought we had them on their heels and we could have just knocked them out. But we didn’t. We couldn’t throw that extra punch or whatever it is.”

The officials were the ones delivering the blows. They waved off a Matt Hasselbeck-to-Darrell Jackson scoring play. The back judge signaled touchdown, then grabbed his penalty flag and tossed it. Offensive pass interference. Chick Hearn would have called it a ticky-tack foul. Michael Irvin used to get more physical than that during the pregame coin toss.

And on Pittsburgh’s first touchdown, the replays indicated that Roethlisberger was stopped just short of the goal line. The referee even saw the same replays thanks to a booth-ordered review of the play, but still gave Pittsburgh the six points.

Still, don’t put this on the guys with the stripes. The officials didn’t bite on the reverse to Randle El and blow the coverage on the pass to Ward, who was left alone like Tom Hanks in “Cast Away.”

The only role the officials had in kicker Josh Brown’s two missed field-goal tries was signaling wide right and wide left.

Here’s a sequence that defined the day for the Seahawks and also sealed their fate. They trailed, 14-10, in the fourth quarter and were moving. First, a holding penalty negated an 18-yard completion to the Pittsburgh six. Then, Hasselbeck threw a pass that was picked off by Ike Taylor.

“He’s a pretty precise passer,” Seattle Coach Mike Holmgren said. “And that one went up for grabs.”

Hasselbeck made his share of other mistakes that weren’t picked off, but a good chunk of the blame for his 23 incomplete passes belongs to Jerramy Stevens, who dropped three balls.

Fittingly, Seattle’s last play ended with Stevens on the ground, the ball having been knocked loose, and linebacker Joey Porter standing above him signaling incomplete.

Porter is the one who called out Stevens after Stevens suggested the Bettis homecoming story wouldn’t have a happy ending because the Steelers would lose. (Porter wasn’t a story in this game, either, with three quiet tackles and no sacks.)

Stevens’ quote would not have been so incendiary if Porter hadn’t turned it into an excuse to trash him.

But that’s how it went for Seattle in the week before. They were there to provide the setup lines, or sing in the background. To put it in Motown terms, they were the Supremes or the Vandellas.

The oddsmakers and national media consensus picked against them. A dominantly gold-and-black crowd (Seahawk fans were hard to find) waved Terrible Towels at them. The officials’ calls went against them so badly, Porter would have said they were cheated -- if he didn’t happen to be on the other team.

So all the Seahawks had were themselves. And all they had to blame were themselves.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read more by Adande go to latimes.com/adandeblog.