The Detroit Lions and the Seattle Seahawks delivered an open exchange of blows until the last second. The 93 points between the two teams were highlight enough on their own, but the final score of 48:45 was something very special: a Scorigami.

Munich/Detroit – The Detroit Lions narrowly lost the spectacle against the Seattle Seahawks 45:48 without the German-American star receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown. The 93 points between two teams ranks 16th on the list of regular-season games with the highest scores. But what made it special was that this score had never happened before. In the NFL, this feat is called: Scorigami.

The portmanteau word scorigami is made up of the English “score” and the Japanese paper folding art “origami”.

To be exact, the Seahawks’ 48:45 was the 1073rd scorigami in NFL history. The list of never before scored final scores of a game is similarly long. Because of the different ways of scoring points in American football, the possibility of results is almost unlimited.

Only some results in which a team has only one point are mathematically excluded. For this rare case, a team would have to score a safety on the opponent’s PAT as a defence. A 1:1, for example, is not possible, but a 0:0 has already occurred 73 times – the last one, however, in 1943. The most frequent result so far is the 20:17 (276), followed by the 27:24 (226) – that occurred on this matchday between the Green Bay Packers and the New England Patriots.

That Pete Carroll’s Seahawks, of all teams, were a part of the recent scorigami seems no coincidence. Between 2010 and 2018, the team managed exactly one unique score in each season – probably the most famous in the 43-8 over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII.

The head coach joked about it in a press conference back during that series: “It’s insane. I don’t know how it happens. But I’m happy it happened again. We worked hard on it in the offseason.” So after three seasons of abstinence, his Seahawks have done it again.