With Super Bowl XL hype about to kick into high gear, the national media are going to suddenly rediscover Seattle and step into a time warp. It will be 1992 all over again.

You'll hear all about Nirvana, Starbucks, and how it rains so much, they sometimes have to take arks to work.

Most of it will be wrong. I know; I've lived in Seattle.

You'll hear all the requisite references to Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam as if the Northwest is still the center of the grunge universe. Now, does Death Cab for Cutie sound anything like Screaming Trees? Does Modest Mouse even remotely resemble Soundgarden? No, and no. Seattle's music scene has long since evolved beyond the Sub Pop era.

They'll portray the city as obsessed with Starbucks. Yes, Starbucks is headquartered in Seattle and yes, there are roughly a million Starbucks locations in the city, just like every other major city in the country.

But unlike other cities, there are also roughly a billion other options if you want a latte. The tourists flock to Starbucks. For the locals, the coffee hierarchy is roughly: 1. Their favorite mom-and-pop-type spots, of which there is one or more on every street corner; 2. Any of about a half-dozen other local and regional chains; 3. Starbucks, if nothing else is around.

Just another sunny day at Qwest Field.

And then, there's The Big Cliche: The rain. Writers and TV types will get so wrapped up in conjuring cutesy images about the rain that they'll skim right over a basic fact:

Seattle gets less rain than most recent Super Bowl cities.

Seattle is the least rainy city participating in this year's big game. The Emerald City averages 36 inches of rain per year. Pittsburgh gets 37. Host city Detroit gets 41.

Among last year's Super Bowl cities, not only does Boston (54 inches) average more rain per year than Seattle, but so do fellow New England state capitals Providence (45) and Hartford (47). The Patriots' opponent, Philadelphia, gets 40 inches of rain per year. Oh, and Jacksonville, last year's hosts, has an average annual rainfall of 53 inches.

Carolina, the home of New England's championship opponent from the previous year, gets more rain than Seattle (Charlotte gets 43 inches per year). As does Super Bowl XXXVIII host Houston (44). Ditto for New England's opponent from Super Bowl XXXVI, St. Louis (38). And host New Orleans (60). And Super Bowl XXXV, where New York (40) played Baltimore (41) in Tampa Bay (47). And St. Louis' opponent in SB XXXIV, Tennessee. Nashville gets 48 inches per year.

And so on. This is simply rainfall, mind you, not overall precipitation. It rarely snows in Seattle. If you added all forms of precipitation to the mix, some of the cities listed above would double Seattle in total.

Of course, Seattle is by far the cloudiest city to participate in the Super Bowl, with more than 200 overcast days per year. But those clouds rarely break into anything more than a drizzle most of the year, and most of the steady rain comes in the winter, when the weather is terrible just about everywhere. The clouds disappear almost entirely in the summer.

It did not rain on Qwest Field on a game day once in the Seahawks' first two seasons in their new digs. But no matter. Get ready to hear about how 'Hawks fans brave the floods while listening to Nirvana and sipping Starbucks on their way to the field anyway.

-- DAVE DOYLE