Before I start on the Saints - this morning's weigh-in - 182.5, down 10.5 pounds from the beginning of the contest. Aiming for 180 by next Tuesday...we'll see what happens there.
The title of this post links to an excellent article about the Saints and the post-Katrina impact on New Orleans. It covers this weekend' post-game reaction more eloquently than I ever could without being there. I still would like to make a comment.
Often times the press and Hollywood portrays sports as something bigger than it is.
Who can forget James Earl Jones as writer Terrence Mann in Field of Dreams and his speech that ends with this statement; "The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."
As reporters we once wrote about how Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa helped bring the fans back to baseball, making too much out of a homerun race. If it wasn't them, something else would have brought the fans back, it just would have taken longer.
Games are typically just games, and the fans moods often affected by the results of the games - but often its temporary.
As a Sox fan I was often disappointed in the early to mid 1990's when I lived in the shadow of Fenway Park, because, let's face it, the Sox weren't a good team then. But the well-being of the region didn't suffer for the suffering of the fans.
This year's Saints team was different.
The team has been a visible metaphor for the region. Last year homeless and helpless, relying on another region to house them, the league to support them. And watching them, you could see they were having trouble getting their legs under them.
This year they started new; new coach, new quarterback, new receivers in a renewed dome.
The new stars, Drew Brees and Reggie Bush, adopted their new company's home as their own, and have done what they could to aid in the rebuilding efforts.
Like the team's season, the rebuilding of the Crescent City is incomplete. The Saints marched as far as they could, and a journey that began in the swamp and flood of post-Katrina New Orleans, now two seasons ago, ended in the mud of a snowy field in Chicago.
The team, metaphor to the outsiders, was something much more to the people of the region. They were more than just one of the best stories in the NFL this year. They did something that every NFL team does for their fans at the beginning of every season, but they did it on an entirely new level; they offered hope.
This was more than hope for a championship.
This was about the renewal of a region. With a team so perennially bad as the Saints have been ( so bad that sports reporters called them the 'Ain'ts, me included, and fans once wore brown bags over their heads so they can't be identified) can get this close to the Super Bowl, closer than the team has ever come, then maybe the seemingly impossible task of rebuilding the city isn't as impossible as it seems.
To get a real sense of the team's importance to the region, click on the link above and read the ESPN article. If you're not touched by it, you're not human.
And a final note to Saints owner Tom Benson. Benson, as most avid sports fans know, has talked about moving the Saints for a number of years to locations where he believes the team will be more profitable. Built in the 1970's, the Superdome lacks some of the ammenities of newer stadiums that drive revenues higher such as the luxury suites and seat licenses. Because of this, Benson has flirted with Los Angeles and San Antonio as destinations for his franchise.
However, Benson is not hurting, as there is no NFL franchise right now that's losing money. For him to move the franchise from that region now would be unforgivable.
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