[StBernard] Awesome Saints Article in Washington Post

Westley Annis Westley at da-parish.com
Thu Jan 28 22:25:50 EST 2010


Where floodwaters once stood, a tide of emotion rises in New Orleans
By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 25, 2010; D01


NEW ORLEANS

It was a contact drunk. You didn't have to swallow a drop for this NFC
championship game to make you feel totally inebriated, like you'd been
swilling the cheap well whiskey of Bourbon Street all night. When the action
finally ceased, after nearly four hours, the wrenching swings and lead
changes, dramatic spirals and swoons left you staggering amid the great
geysers of horn music and confetti. The New Orleans Saints, dragging a whole
metropolis on their backs, had advanced to the Super Bowl, but only in
overtime after one man, Brett Favre, tried to take down the entire city.



The Superdome crowd of 71,276 was incoherent with madness; it was the
loudest noise ever, a hurricane in your head.. But when you thought it
couldn't get any louder, it went up another notch, into a great shrill
stratosphere as Garrett Hartley stepped up to a 40-yard field goal with 10
minutes 15 seconds left in overtime. Behind the uprights was a large
fleur-de-lis emblazoned on an upper deck of the Superdome, that
storm-ravaged facility. Saints Coach Sean Payton told Hartley, "Why don't
you just hit that fleur-de-lis dead center?" Hartley did exactly that,
sailed the ball through the uprights toward that ornate emblem of a team and
a city, to give them the 31-28 victory over the Minnesota Vikings and the
greatest moment in franchise history.



Make no mistake: They won for love of their city. They won for all the
neighborhoods where the benighted old mansions now peel and sag, like old
ladies who have misapplied their makeup. For all the buskers and panhandlers
and street dancers, working under shabby, old oaks and palms. They won for
the poor, flooded districts where the horns lament on street corners, Do you
know what it means to miss New Orleans, I miss it both night and day.
Had a town ever craved a victory more than New Orleans? All across the city,
people who had lost everything needed so desperately to win something. Even
the cops on street corners chanted, "WHO DAT?" The local paper, the
Times-Picayune, threw away all dispassion and ran a banner headline Sunday
morning: "Our Team. Our Town. Our Time." One Saints fan outside the
Superdome even stamped a fleur-de-lis on the side of his great Dane. Party
wagons with Klaxons barreled down the boulevards, imbibers hanging from the
windows.



"Four years ago there were holes in this roof," Payton said. "The fans in
this region and this city deserve this."



This time, the wreckage on the field and in the streets was sweet, beads and
feathers and streamers, as opposed to the flotsam and detritus of the flood.
The references were inescapable, and the Saints didn't shy from them. All
season, they had announced they were playing for something much larger than
themselves. "It's a calling," quarterback Drew Brees said. After all, their
home stadium had been the last refuge in the city for 30,000 residents
during Hurricane Katrina, and an earthly version of hell during the
storm-flood afterwards, strewn with debris and with breaches in the roof.
The damage was so heavy, and so emblematic of New Orleans's sense of trauma
and abandonment, that city officials nearly decided to tear it down.



Instead it underwent a $200 million renovation, and when the Saints returned
to it in 2006, they did so with a new head coach in Payton, and a
quarterback the rest of the league had given up on in the sore-shouldered
Brees. The renovated dome was a charmless edifice, all gray cinder block,
but it was filled with the ghosts of Katrina, and the men who played inside
the building never once flinched from the responsibility of that.. On the
contrary, they took specific, enormous pride in it. "Ninety percent of
people who come up to me on the street don't say, 'Great game,' " Brees said
back in 2006, when he first got to town. "They say, 'Thank you for being
part of the city.' "



Brees and Payton became the guys who came to New Orleans when no one else
would. They arrived when the city was still destroyed and there was still
junk in the streets. When Payton moved to the city, it was nearly empty, and
the franchise was so lacking in facilities it had to hold training camp in
Jackson, Miss. "There was a lot of traffic going the other direction, not
much going in," Payton recalled. Businesses were so shuttered that at one
point, he had to stand in line for two hours at a Walgreen's drug store to
get an antibiotic for his daughter, and could only get half the prescription
filled. "In other words, it was different," he said. "It was hard to explain
if you weren't here."



Brees was looking for a new team after the San Diego Chargers had no use for
him. He committed to a city still partly underwater. "There were still boats
in living rooms and trucks flipped upside down on top of houses," he said
earlier this week. "Some houses just off the foundation and totally gone.
You just say, 'Man, what happened here? It looks like a nuclear bomb went
off.' For me, I looked at that as an opportunity. An opportunity to be part
of the rebuilding process. How many people get that opportunity in their
life to be a part of something like that?"



One of these days, football will just be football again in New Orleans, but
on this night, it was much more. Everything seemed to have outsize meaning,
from the stakes to the noise. Then, as if the game needed anything more, the
40-year-old Favre delivered a living-legend performance.
Time and again, Favre choked off the crowd and the momentum as he directed
scoring drives downfield. He struck at the Saints repeatedly, like a
rattlesnake, as he threw for 310 yards with an assortment of lasers and
fades while enduring a succession of shuddering blows. Gimpy and grizzled,
he just kept slinging it downfield. In the final minute of regulation he
threatened to bring the entire building down as he drove the Vikings once
more, this time to the Saints 38. Finally, with 19 seconds left in
regulation, Favre made a fatal mistake. Facing third down and 15 yards to
go, he rolled right, then whirled and threw back to his left toward Sidney
Rice -- but right into the hands of cornerback Tracy Porter. That
effectively sent the game into overtime.



After all that, it came down to a coin toss. That was the break the Saints
needed to close the deal. Favre would never return to the field; overtime
belonged to the Saints, who won the toss, then got a blazing 40-yard kick
return from Pierre Thomas. From there, the Saints inched their way into
field goal position. Hartley took aim at that fleur-de-lis and sent the ball
up, and the sound came down from the upper reaches of the Superdome like a
landslide.



"It's surreal," Brees said. "Coming here four years ago, post-Katrina. . . .
It's unbelievable, it's unbelievable. You can draw so many parallels between
our team and our city. In reality we've had to lean on each other in order
to survive. The city is on its way to recovery. We've used the strength and
resilience of our fans to go out and play with confidence on Sundays. It's
been one step at a time, and we've had to play through plenty of adversity.
Just like this town has."




More information about the StBernard mailing list