When Russell Wilson returns to Seattle, will we treat him like A-Rod or Ken Griffey Jr.?

Russell Wilson isn’t the first star to break up with Seattle.

Ken Griffey Jr. did it back in 1999, requesting a trade so he could be closer to his family. We never stopped loving Griffey, though. Marshawn Lynch retired for a year in 2016 before coming back in Oakland, and that didn’t bother us much either.

Then there’s Alex Rodriguez, who skipped town for Texas in 2000 for $252 million and his own pharmaceutical start-up, and we’ve been letting him have it ever since.

So how is Seattle going to greet Wilson on Monday night when his first game with his new team is played in front of the fans of his former franchise? Will he be cheered like Griffey, embraced as unconditionally as Lynch? Will he be jeered like Rodriguez?

We like to think decisions like this will be rational. That we add up all the contributions a player has made, who he has been on the field and off, and then judiciously weigh that against the motives of his departure to arrive at a verdict on how this player should be viewed.

But really, it’s not a decision that we make, but a reaction we have. A gut-level feeling about what that player meant to us and — maybe even more important — what we think we meant to him. And while Wilson isn’t like A-Rod, he isn’t like Griffey for me, either, or even Lynch. The hard part is explaining why.

Russ was everything we say a quarterback should be. He was calm under pressure and unflaggingly positive even in defeat. He acknowledged his teammates, often by name, and he won. A ton. He was community-minded and generous with his time. As a rookie in 2012, he was offered a fairly lucrative endorsement opportunity that would have required him to miss his Tuesday visit to Children’s Hospital in Seattle. He turned down the endorsement and went to the hospital. That hope, the solace he brought to those patients and those families, is real and it is precious. He’s a loving husband and father, not to mention the fact that he’s the best quarterback in the history of a franchise that has had some fairly good ones.

Yet I don’t know how much we ever knew him. We knew what he wanted us to know, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that seeing him run the same programming now in Denver with a new set of fans makes the past 10 years feel a little less special, like that would have been Wilson’s script no matter where he landed. At least that’s how I feel when I hear Wilson punctuate an interview by saying, “Let’s ride!”

That might be a bit unfair, but I don’t know what fair has to do with being a fan. It’s about the way we feel. That’s what matters way more than the facts, which is why a significant chunk of Seattle is willing to justify its dislike of A-Rod by referencing that one time he said his free agency wasn’t about the money. Except he never said that. Or at least there is no record of Rodriguez ever saying this with regard to his free agency. In fact, in the year before he became a free agent, Rodriguez was asked in a FOX Sports interview whether money or winning was more important to him.

“I think the money at this point is very important to me,” Rodriguez said. “Because I want to take care of my family and the people that I love.”

Honestly, this doesn’t make me feel differently about Rodriguez or his departure. He made it seem like everything was perfect in Seattle until that day he signed with Texas, and that left us feeling like we never really knew him. Or worse, that the person we thought we knew was only a persona.

This sort of thing happens all the time now in sports as players change teams more frequently, and love becomes increasingly conditional. The players love the team they’re on until a better job becomes available, and the fans love the players so long as they don’t choose to go somewhere else.

But every once in a while the relationship between a player and a city becomes more than transactional. Explaining why this happens is like trying to describe the difference between love and like. You know it because you feel it. You know it because you not only bought a chocolate bar imprinted with Griffey’s likeness in 1990, but because that chocolate bar stayed in your Mom’s refrigerator for years in the butter cubby, wrapped in a clear non-Ziploc sandwich bag. Yeah, I did that. And I suspect I’m not the only one.

Our connection to Griffey was immediate and it was electric. You never forget your first love, and Griffey will always be Seattle’s first national sports star. Sure, Lenny Wilkens made a mark first as a Sonics player and then a title-winning coach, and Steve Largent became a Hall of Fame receiver, but Griffey had a signature shoe, his own video game and was named the American League’s MVP in 1997.

He was a hell of a player, and Seattle got to see him at his best. More than that, we understood him. We knew he was sensitive to criticism, both perceived and real. We saw the joy he felt playing the game, that smile at the bottom of the dog-pile after he scored on “The Double” in 1995, but even as I say all these things it fails to capture the depth of that feeling.

A player doesn’t have to be perfect, but it means something different when they’re real. At least that’s true for me.

I covered Lynch first as a reporter and later a radio host. I’ve seen how defiant, how stubborn he can be. Often this was funny, like when he didn’t want to answer questions from the media and wound up saying the same thing over and over. Sometimes it was not. Lynch decided – after practicing all week before a playoff game – that he wasn’t ready to play in Minnesota in January 2016. They had to change the flight manifest because he wasn’t traveling.

But Lynch was also one of the single most entertaining and downright endearing people I’ve ever been around. The kind of guy who returned someone’s lost wallet up in Snohomish County, and then got mad when a local television reporter asked him about it. I’ve heard hundreds of athletes claim they’d prefer their good deeds remain unpublicized, but I’ve seen only one curse loudly to try and keep their good deed from being publicized.

With Lynch, you never knew what he was going to do. He was impulsive and spontaneous and a total contrast to the quarterback because you always knew what Wilson was going to say. That’s not to say Lynch was a better Seahawk than Wilson. He wasn’t. The Seahawks made the playoffs eight times in Wilson’s 10 seasons. They won the franchise’s first Super Bowl and were a play away from winning a second one. Peyton Manning is the only player in NFL history to throw for more touchdowns in his first 10 seasons than Wilson.

Those accomplishments warrant an ovation, one that I hope is long and loud for all that he did in Seattle. This isn’t like A-Rod, and I don’t think he should be booed for the break-up. But I’m not going to be cheering for him in the future, either. At least not like I did with Griffey and with Lynch, because I never felt that level of connection.

Danny O’Neil is a Northwest native who covered Puget Sound sports for 20 years at The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and 710 AM, a sports-radio station in Seattle. He is now a freelance writer in Manhattan, and a contributor to Seattle Magazine. He is working on a non-fiction book about Pete Carroll. He remains a devoted fan of the Poodle Dog in Fife.