SEATTLE — It almost was like déjà vu.
At the end of the third quarter in the 49ers’ 36-24 win over the Seattle Seahawks, it appeared Kyle Shanahan and his team were headed down a familiar path with a healthy lead slipping away.
Fred Warner and several of his teammates recognized the feeling of their past two losses against the Los Angeles Rams and Arizona Cardinals — and they vowed not to let it happen again.
“One thousand percent,” Warner said when asked if it felt like they were headed down the same path. “It sucked, but yes. It was something that felt familiar for sure and I’m like, ‘Hey, we can go one of two ways right here. We can stand tall in a hostile environment in a game that we know we got to get, or we can settle for exactly how we’ve been playing in the last couple of losses that we’ve had.’
“That’s what I’m most probably proud of right now, is the way we stood up.”
Going into halftime, the 49ers had a 16-3 lead. In the opening drive of the second half, 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy led the offense down the field with a nine-play, 70-yard drive that was capped by a George Kittle touchdown to stretch the lead to 20 points.
Then things appeared to go off the rails in all phases of the game for the 49ers, and a total collapse seemed imminent.
Seattle’s Lavishka Shenault returned the ensuing kickoff back for a 97-yard touchdown, bringing the Seahawks within 13 points after the 49ers’ special teams unit missed multiple tackles during the play.
On the 49ers’ drive that followed, the offense could only muster 29 yards through four plays and was forced to punt. The Seahawks then answered with a 13-play, 94-yard touchdown drive to close the lead to six points.
Shanahan tried as much as he could to suppress the feeling that he had been down the same road before.
“I’m not going to go to what’s happened on our last two losses,” Shanahan said. “Just staying locked in, not trying to get any negative feelings, and just try to do it one play at a time. Our goal is to be locked in the entire game regardless of what the score was and I thought the guys played like that.”
Kyle Juszczyk, who helped cap the final offensive drive to close the door on a potential Seahawks comeback, shared that there was talk on the sidelines about the responsibility that the offense felt to win the game.
“The message on our sideline was, ‘All right, we’re faced with this again, Let’s go take it,’ ” Juszczyk said. “ ‘Let’s not hope that we did enough already, that we built a big enough lead and hopefully things work out and we get the win. No, let’s go cement this win, going in to score and put it on our shoulders.’
“That’s exactly what we did, and I’m happy it ended that way. That was definitely a point of emphasis.”
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