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Over the course of the offseason, as Earl Thomas III recovers from surgery to repair a torn labrum, we’ll be counting down the top five plays made by No. 29 last season.

Coming in at No. 2 is a play where Earl sacrificed his body and did his part to help fuel one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history.

ET Top 5—No. 2: The Championship Hit

For a while, it seemed like January 18, 2015 simply wasn’t Seattle’s day.

The Seahawks were playing host to the Green Bay Packers in the NFL Championship, trying to win one more game to make it back to the Super Bowl  and get the opportunity to defend their NFL crown.

But nothing had gone the way of the home team at CenturyLink Field on this Sunday afternoon.

The Hawks were down 16-0 at halftime, and worse yet, their defensive dynamo, Earl Thomas, wasn’t close to full strength. On a key play in the second quarter, ET made a big play to yank down one of Green Bay’s top offensive playmakers, Randall Cobb, short of a first down.

The stop forced the Packers into a 3rd-and-3, and eventually they had to settle for a Mason Crosby field goal that made it 16-0, still just a two-score game. In hindsight, it was one of Seattle’s biggest stops of the day, as it kept them within striking distance.

But on the tackle, Earl dislocated his shoulder—and as it was later revealed, he had suffered a torn his labrum on the impactful hit. Still he missed just one series and three plays when he went to the locker room to have it popped back in place and fitted with a brace.

“I’m a man, man,” Earl infamously said later. “I love this game, I put my heart in it. There’s too much at stake for me to be sitting in here while my teammates are out there battling.”

ET III wasn’t tested in the final plays of the first half. But he was back out there when the teams returned to the field in the second half and on Green Bay’s first drive of the third quarter, No. 29 — clipped wing and all — made a play that sparked a fire under his team.

The Seattle offense began the half with another three-and-out, handing the ball back to the Packers with a chance to essentially put the game out of reach.

On the first play of the ensuing Green Bay drive, they handed that ball to their bruising 230-pound running back, Eddie Lacy running left, right through Area 29. Earl chased Lacy to the sideline, but he refused to let the big back skirt out of bounds easily. Instead, ET threw his body — injured shoulder first — into Lacy’s, rocking the GB back and sending him crashing out of bounds, where he came to rest, sitting on the Seattle bench.

Seattle head coach Pete Carroll was among those on the sideline who loved that tone-setting hit by Earl.

“Earl hurt his shoulder and he comes back and hits Lacy on the sidelines with the harnessed shoulder as hard as you could possibly hit the guy and knocked him out of bounds,” Carroll said. “That’s just total guts.”

Green Bay went three-and-out on that drive, and with a newfound confidence and the revitalized 12s of Seattle now teeming with energy, the comeback was on. The Seahawks scored 22 of the next 25 points in the game to take the lead and although the Packers knotted the score at 22 to send the contest to overtime, that extra session belonged to Seattle.

That momentum, started in part by the bone-jarring hit from Earl, kept rolling, as the Hawks cruised downfield, and Russell Wilson hit Jermaine Kearse for the game-winning 35-yard score.

The game was so emotional for ET III that he penned a lengthy blog about the game afterward, explaining the scene, his point of view, and what it was like on that Sunday afternoon, battling in the trenches with the Legion of Boom and the rest of the Hawks to a comeback victory.

“When I got back to the locker room after the game, I was in a trance,” Earl wrote. “I was crying in my locker. I was just overwhelmed with the emotions. I stayed in my locker for a long time, just sitting there, trying to take everything in.

It was like a movie. When I think about it, I just see everybody battling. Sherm, Kam, myself, Marshawn, Russell, everyone. Everybody was battling something. We weren’t crisp. Things didn’t go our way. There was adversity everywhere.

But how we fought, how the offense fought, how we fed off each other, how Coach Carroll never gave up on us, how our position coaches never gave up on us, it says a lot about us. We all battled to get back to this point, and it happened.”

The win earned Seattle their second straight Super Bowl berth, the first time in franchise history they’d repeated at conference champions. And even though the Hawks ultimately came up short of defending their crown in Super Bowl XLIX, the NFC Championship win will still stand as one of the greatest in the team’s history—and one of the best in NFL history.