Associated Press

SEATTLE --- The baseball team spent $100 million and rolled it into 101 losses. The NFL team, once the Super Bowl-bound pride of the loudest crowd in the league, is 1-3 and fading.

The college football team, long a perennial Rose Bowl contender, has taken out a long-term lease on the Pac-10 basement, with a fractured fan base and a crumbling stadium adding to its misery.

And the NBA team, the one with the city's only major pro sports championship? It's just plain gone, shuttled 2,000 miles away to the Midwest.

Not so long ago, Seattle was a proud sports town.

Now the gloom settling over the fans of the Emerald City will only be matched by the impending months of gray and drizzle.

Fan optimism is rarely rewarded in Seattle. The city's teams are remembered more for their many failures -- no Super Bowl titles, no World Series appearances, the loss of their oldest professional franchise -- than the four championships teams: the 1979 NBA SuperSonics, the 1991 University of Washington football team, the 2004 WNBA Storm and the 1917 Stanley Cup champion Seattle Metropolitans.

The current scene in Seattle might be the dreariest since the late 1960s, without a single team worth cheering for.

The civic mood was already turning sour even before the harshest blow of 2008 -- the July settlement between SuperSonics owner Clay Bennett and the city of Seattle allowing the team to move to Oklahoma City, ending 41 seasons of professional basketball.

The Mariners were expected to be up-and-comers ready to challenge the more experienced and talented Los Angeles Angels. Instead, they underachieved with a surly clubhouse, becoming the first team in baseball history with a $100 million payroll and 100 losses. Baseball was an afterthought by mid-May.

Then came the Seahawks' missteps.

Besieged by key injuries, they stumbled through their first three games. They got healthy just in time to be outclassed in their fourth game and get handed the third-worst loss in franchise history by the New York Giants.

And across town at the University of Washington? The Huskies are 0-5 for the first time in 39 years, and an angry fan base, clinging to the success of two decades ago, can't wait to run underperforming coach Tyrone Willingham out of town. Those yearly trips to Pasadena that Husky fans saw as a birthright are now a fading dream.