"Seventeen Power isn't all that complicated a football play.

In fact it's simple enough to be a staple in an NFL playbook. And Seattle was in its most basic personnel grouping when offensive coordinator Jeremy Bates called Seventeen Power for the first and only time during Saturday's playoff game against New Orleans. The Seahawks had two receivers, two backs and a tight end on the field for a play that was only a little more ambitious than a quarterback sneak.

"If you get 4.1 yards you're patting yourself on the back," quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said.

But on Saturday, 11 Seahawks took that one simple play and spun it into gold as Marshawn Lynch ran 67 yards, the longest postseason play in franchise history. At least eight Saints touched him on a play that has been burned into the hard drive of our city's consciousness.

The play took 15 seconds, its reverberations registering on a seismometer and shaking the defending Super Bowl champions out of the playoffs. But the explanation requires so much more — from the precision of the blocking assignments to Lynch's adamant and repeated refusal to be tackled, to the fact that center Chris Spencer found himself in the right place at precisely the right moment because of nothing more than good luck and sharp instincts.

It took more than a running back to produce a play like this.

"When I look at it, I think, 'Man, I had a lot of help,' " Lynch said.

Eleven players had interlocking assignments, and it takes a magnifying glass and an interpreter to diagnose just what happened. The Seattle Times interviewed each of the 11 players on the field for that play, plus Bates, the color commentator who called it for NBC and former NFL quarterback and current ESPN analyst Ron Jaworski, who described the play while watching the coach's tape at NFL Films.

The result is a snapshot of everything that goes into making even one of the simplest plays in football successful."