They are known as the 12s, those Seattle Seahawks fans who show so much adoration and make so much noise for their team that they are, as the number suggests, like having a 12th man on the football field.
Seahawks fan Michelle Knittle of Big Lake is a 12 multiplied by 1,000.
She wears a blue wig -- a team color -- on game day. Decals on her nails sport images of the Seahawks logo, a football, the Space Needle. She bought a house in the Valley after seeing a Seahawks banner outside a Wasilla restaurant.
"I knew it was the town for me," she said.
But what really makes Knittle a 12-times-1,000 fan is the fervor she showed in recent weeks while voting for her team in an Alaska Dispatch News poll designed to decide which NFL team is Alaska's favorite.
"I'm thinking I voted between 10,000 and 12,000 times," Knittle said.
"It was all me. I admit it. When I was doing it I thought, 'I wonder if they can arrest me for this?'"
More than 32,000 online votes were cast over the last few weeks, and about one-third of them came from Knittle, the former dean of faculty at Alaska Career College who is wrapping up work on a doctorate degree in higher education and administration.
Knittle's ballot-stuffing might seem criminal to fans of the Green Bay Packers, the team that topped our NFL survey in 2011 -- except a couple of Packer fans did the same thing. So did a bunch of fans for the Minnesota Vikings and San Francisco 49ers.
The Seahawks won the poll -- overwhelmingly -- but not because Knittle was willing to risk carpal tunnel syndrome at the altar of her computer.
We eliminated multiple votes from the same email address, which shrank the vote total from 32,000 to about 1,200, plus another 50 ballots that came in the mail. We didn't tally votes from the comment sections on Facebook or our website.
The Seahawks, who have won a Super Bowl and played in two since our last poll, garnered 637 votes to reclaim their title as Alaska's team. The last time we did a poll, the Packers prevailed with 32.8 percent of the vote to Seattle's 24.2 percent.
This time, the Packers finished a distant second with 231 votes. No other team made it into triple figures.
We've asked Alaskans to vote for their favorite team seven times over a 31-year span. On four occasions, the Seahawks came out on top -- 1984, 1986, 2007 and this year.
In 1990, the Joe Montana-led 49ers beat the Seahawks. In 1994, the Packers led an NFC Central sweep of the top three spots, with the Vikings second and the Detroit Lions third. Four years ago, the Pack was back on top.
The polling is entirely unscientific, as Knittle's persistence demonstrates.
Knittle offered a simple explanation for her many votes.
"Somebody else kept doing it," she said. "I wouldn't have done it if they hadn't. I was afraid somebody else would win."
Knittle, 50, said she voted only as often as she thought necessary to fend off other attempts to stuff the ballot. Before going to bed she would look at the vote totals, and if she saw the Packers or Vikings or 49ers had enjoyed a surge that she was sure the work of one or two superfans, she responded accordingly.
"I wanted to build a lead so nobody would overtake me in my sleep," she said. "I'm a numbers person, so in my head I was counting (votes) whole time. Theirs and mine.
"First it was the Vikings, then Green Bay, and then right at the end it was San Francisco. They got 2,000 votes while I was sleeping one night."
Knittle said for her first 1,000 or so ballots, she opened the link to the survey, filled out the entire form, then hit submit. Again and again and again.
Then, one night, what she called "a happy accident" occurred.
"I got a timeout error," she said. "I hit the back button and there was my form, all filled out."
She hit submit. Then she hit the back arrow again, and again her completed form appeared. So she clicked submit again. Once she saw how easy repeated voting could be, she was on her way.
"It's a lot faster when you can just hit back, enter; back, enter," Knittle said.
The logic behind the votes
All of the NFL's 32 teams drew votes. No surprise there, considering so many Alaskans grew up someplace other than Alaska.
Yet plenty of Alaskans chose the Seahawks because they're the closest team to us geographically, and because players often do promotional trips to Alaska during the offseason.
"They visited Fairview Elementary back in 1995," one fan wrote as they cast their vote. "Been my favorite team since!"
"I have been following the Hawks since Steve Largent and Jim Zorn toured the Anchorage high schools in the late '70s," wrote another.
Many voters cited family ties, like one Green Bay fan: "My great uncle played for them for 11 years, two of those being when they won Super Bowl I and II. He was NFL rookie of the year in 1959. Go Pack Go!"
Wrote a Dallas fan: "My mother died of cancer very young. She loved the Cowboys, and I pay tribute to her by being a Cowboys fan also."
A number of transplants to the state brought loyalties with them when they moved to Alaska:
"Life long Steeler fan. Raised in that part of the country, when the steel mills were in full force! I was a fan even in the bleak years," wrote a Pittsburgh voter.
"Born & raised in WI, enjoying games back in the days of Lombardi, Starr, Nitschke, etc.," wrote a Packers fan.
"We're from Minnesota," wrote a Vikings fan. "Alaska has no professional sports teams. Don't understand the mentality of people who think that Seattle is an Alaskan 'home team.' Weird loyalty."
Others trace their loyalty to things other than geography:
"Native design, awesome team," wrote a Seahawks fan.
"I had a crush on Jim Kelly!" said a Buffalo Bills fan.
The most entertaining comments came from fans of one of the NFL's perennial sad-sack teams -- the Detroit Lions:
"Grew up listening to my uncle rail at how uniquely bad the Lions were after Thanksgiving dinner at his house."
"Born into it, unfortunately. #RebuildingSince1957."
"It's a long, sad story."
As for Knittle, she became a Seahawks fan in 1976, the franchise's first year. She was about 10 years old and her sisters liked the Dallas Cowboys, and Knittle wanted to be different.
When she moved to Alaska in 2007, she was thrilled to find fellow fanatics. But none were so fanatic to sit at a computer like Knittle did in recent weeks, submitting vote after vote after vote.
"I like the fact that I'm Alaska's most dedicated Seahawks fan," she said.