Happy 50th birthday to the Seahawks!

June 4 is a special day in the history of Seattle sports.

Exactly 50 years ago today, the National Football League awarded a franchise to the city of Seattle, giving the city its second major sports team* alongside the National Basketball Association’s SuperSonics.

*Once upon a time, there was a Major League Baseball team before the Mariners, but the Pilots only lasted one season (1969) before becoming the Milwaukee Brewers. The Mariners expansion was granted in 1976 (mid-lawsuit) and their inaugural season began in 1977.

Let’s go into the time machine and look at how the New York Times covered this story:

The National Football League awarded a franchise to Seattle yesterday, bringing the total number of its teams to 28. The new teams in Tampa and Seattle will begin play in the 1976 season.

The owners of the present 26 teams left further expansion an open and indefinite matter with no plan or schedule or favored cities. “There’s no list,” said Commissioner Pete Rozelle “It’s an open deck.”

Memphis and Phoenix were also in contention for expansion but obviously lost out. To this day, Memphis does not have an NFL team, whereas Phoenix would eventually land the Cardinals in a relocation from St. Louis in 1988.

The Houston Texans are the most recent NFL expansion franchise. When the NFL awarded a new team to Houston in 1999, the expansion fee cost a reported whopping $700 million. As for the Seahawks? A hell of a lot less, even adjusting for inflation.

The Seattle franchise will cost $16‐million, the same price fixed for Tampa. Within the next 90 days the league’s expansion committee will select the ownership groups from a list of potential bidders for both franchises. Exact terms of how the money is to be paid will be worked out by the expansion committee.

The $32‐million is to be distributed among the present 26 teams. The new clubs will get for their money about 40 lesser players selected from the present teams on a stocking basis, the formula of which still has to be worked out.

Seattle’s appeal obviously was its new domed stadium, one to be completed late In the summer of 1975 at a cost of $43‐million.

(Spoiler: The Kingdome ultimately cost more than $43 million, and by the time the bonds were paid off the stadium had long imploded.)

The team name was announced on June 17, 1975, and the first Seahawks game kicked off on September 12, 1976. So while we’ll have to wait two more years for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Seahawks actually playing games, the origin story began on this day back in 1974.

It’s been far from a smooth-sailing experience over the decades. Seattle didn’t reach the playoffs until 1983, when Chuck Knox unexpectedly took the Seahawks to the AFC Championship. Three more playoff appearances in the 1980s gave away to the drabness of the 1990s, including the historically awful 1992 offense and the near-relocation to Anaheim by Ken Behring. Paul Allen swooped in to buy the team in 1997, and the rest is history.

Since the turn of the millennium, the Seahawks have enjoyed the eighth-best regular season win percentage, eighth-most playoff wins, 15 postseason berths, 9 division titles, 3 NFC Championship victories, and a little something called the Super Bowl.

Photo by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images

Happy birthday to the franchise we’ve come to know and love (and sometimes hate to love) across multiple generations.

SEA!!!!