A.J. Duhe, that hero of so many Dolphins victories of yore, all but pumped his fists into the air in a Dolphin Stadium elevator a few moments after his old team finally turned back Seattle's Seahawks 21-19.

''Great drama,'' Duhe said, grinning ear to ear. ``I never saw a bad win yet.''

Duhe left everything on the field when he played, and his loyalty remains undiminished. He saw a bad win Sunday. He was just too loyal to admit it.

The Dolphins started gangbusters and finished with the touchdown they needed to nose out one of the worst teams in the National Football League.

That was good. Only they looked awful in between. They couldn't run, couldn't pass, couldn't block, couldn't tackle. The Seahawks -- the lowly Seahawks, for crying out loud -- were literally playing the Dolphins off their feet.

Arm-tackling and no-tackling allowed the Seahawks 126 yards rushing. The same Miami deficiencies staked Seattle to 147 total yards in kickoff and punt returns. That's a lot when a good team does it. It's lousy when you let a raggedy crew like the Seahawks get away with it.

Channing Crowder was banging Seattle heads all afternoon. So, too, was Matt Roth. Will Allen, Jason Allen and Yeremiah Bell made telling plays in the secondary. The field was not overflowing with other Dolphins stars. And the Hawks were matching Dolphins misstep for misstep.

If the Dolphins can win a third consecutive game playing like this, it is lovely to imagine what they might achieve at their best.

Meanwhile, no one will be indicted for calling this inferior football all the way around.

The Seahawks got lucky when Ted Ginn Jr.'s 100-yard kickoff return on the game's very first play was called back for holding.

That luck caught up with them on Chad Pennington's 39-yard flea-flicker to an amazingly leaping and grabbing Ginn in the end zone. You can call that one ''Holy Dolphin!'' and credit offensive coordinator Dan Henning for it.

Pennington might be the biggest and happiest surprise among NFL quarterbacks this season, but he misdelivered a second-quarter hitch into Seahawk Jordan Babineaux's hands as surely as though someone had hung an old tire from a tree for Pennington to use for target practice. Babineaux sashayed 35 uninterrupted yards with the interception return and the Seahawks were back in it at 14-7.

Back to that flea-flicker for a second, it's hard to believe it was propelled by the same man who drilled the pick directly into Babineaux's hands. Pennington obviously has breathed new life into a pro career some thought was over, but still, even with his extraordinary accuracy, 67.4 percent completions for the season -- he is as subject to fits of imperfection as every other NFL quarterback.

STRONG START

Meanwhile, the Dolphins went ahead 14-0 after Ricky Williams' 51-yard run, a journey made possible only by the kind of blocking this work-in-progress offensive line usually only dreams of.

The Dolphins should know you can't let Olindo Mare within field-goal range, especially 37 and 27 yards. But they did, and the pair of them brought the Seahawks to within a point at 14-13.

Then it took Ronnie Brown's 16-yard dash, with the help of a mop-out block by Patrick Cobbs, to boost the Dolphins to 21-13.

If the Hawks had pulled off their two-point conversion attempt after hauling themselves to within 21-19 -- the main drama to which Duhe would later allude -- the Dolphins would have gone to overtime and perhaps made them themselves eligible as laughingstocks of the league today.

They might be anyway.

However, to be sure, no one is laughing at Ginn, or Ricky Wiliams.

Ginn's called-back 100-yard caper and his touchdown catch spoke for themselves.

''Ricky was outstanding,'' coach Tony Sparano said of Williams' 105 net yards on 12 runs, a nice little 8.8-yard average.

I can't vouch for Sparano's innermost feelings, but earlier in the season I was beginning to wonder if Williams was about finished in terms of the ''explosiveness'' Sparano mentioned Sunday. I'm not wondering today, because Ricky made the rather exclusive Good Dolphins list in this game.

The Dolphins catch hapless Oakland here next week, then New England before hitting the road for four of their last five games. Most of those final five opponents do not look terribly imposing prepossessing -- St. Louis, Buffalo, San Francisco, Kansas City and the New York Jets -- but if the Dolphins can play as sloppily on the road as they did here in their latest bout, the prognosis is shaky.

BIGGER EXPECTATIONS

A team that was 1-15 a year ago has moved to 5-4 now, which perhaps should be balm enough. But it's what have you done for me lately in the NFL -- not that that makes it much different from any other business these grim days.

The good news is that this team is capable of catching sudden fire, as it did in the first and fourth quarters. If those fires are often far too brief, any blaze hot enough will burn somebody.

That's what the Dolphins have to do, fan the flames of their strengths, the list of which came up dismayingly short Sunday. No team ever got worse by believing in itself -- no matter how many reasons not to -- and playing hard and smart every down.

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