The fact nagged quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and his Seattle Seahawks teammates, and became a topic of conversation in team meetings. Why, for five straight seasons, had the losing team in the Super Bowl failed to make the playoffs the next year? "It didn't make sense to us," Hasselbeck recalled during his recent vacation on Nantucket. "Coach [Mike] Holmgren talked a lot about it, saying he didn't know why, or what it could possibly be, but his message was to make sure we weren't one of those teams. We felt like we were a team on the rise, not the decline. Our focus was, 'Let's beat this thing.' "