Jack Sikma followed his team's owner and the NBA championship trophy down a chartered jet's stairway under the bluest skies you'll ever see on a summer's day in Seattle once upon a time.
Moments later, the SuperSonics owner told a gathered crowd estimated at 30,000 people, "This is an experience we will probably never see again, until next year when we win it for a second time."
That was nearly 35 years ago.
It also was the last — and only — time a Seattle team won an NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball title, a dry spell the Seahawks could end Sunday with a Super Bowl victory over the Denver Broncos.
Sikma was a second-year, 23-year-old farm boy from Illinois who quickly found a home in the Pacific Northwest, where a Sonics team that featured Dennis Johnson, Fred Brown and Gus Williams took Washington to seven games in the NBA Finals before losing his rookie year and then beat the Bullets in five games the next season.
"My first two years in the league, I got spoiled," said Sikma, who never went further than the conference finals again in his 14-year NBA playing career. "I was the young pup on the team. I probably didn't appreciate then just how hard it is to get there."
He has called Seattle home ever since then, raising his family there even though he later played for Milwaukee and then embarked on a nomadic coaching career that now, at age 58, has brought him to Minneapolis as a Timberwolves assistant coach to Rick Adelman.
A "diehard" Cubs and Bears fan when he was young, Sikma attended Mariners games through the years but really attached himself to the Seahawks because he once palled around with stars Jim Zorn and Steve Largent during his playing days and he prefers the NFL's Sunday pageantry.
