By MeanJoe Gene, contributing writer
It’s been what, a couple weeks now? SINCE THE SAINTS WON THE SUPER BOWL!
You have to understand, I grew up in Nar’lins. During all those 0’fer seasons. Zero division championships. Zero NFC Championships. Hell, zero winning seasons. Zero everything. And here I am, sitting on my couch a couple weeks later still taking it all in.
For me it’s still surreal, unbelievable, unthinkable. My Saints winning the damn Super Bowl. Most Saints fans are still Goggling “Saints win Super Bowl” every 2 hrs, just to be sure.
After the game I was inundated with phone calls and texts… “congrats” … “wow” … “holy crap” … “I’m in shock” … “I don’t believe it”. It all echoed exactly how I felt. I literally couldn’t move from the couch.
Only after I realized how bad and fake the editing was on the show “Undercover Boss” was I able to snap out of it.
So what happened? Was it good coaching? Destiny or luck? I searched my soul and decided it was the city, New Orleans herself, a living entity of contradictions that somehow willed a win.
It’s a city where The French Quarter is filled with Spanish architecture, a voodoo queen is buried in a Catholic cemetery, and by many perceptions unholy people live in Parishes not a Counties.
It’s a place where I still have family. A place where I have friends and colleagues who know the secret of the city, and know there’s no place on earth like it. An ebb and flow energy. A perpetual machine that takes but somehow manages to give back more. In this case it gave us a large win, but a small wound by taking down Peyton Manning, our native son. It made us watch his painful grimace on the sidelines as we tried to ignore him and cheer on.
So how did this happen? How did my Saints win? My crazy half-assed theory is Peyton Manning was powerless to harm the city from which he was born. He faced the one team that could defeat him. Maybe, just maybe he saw the Fleur de lis (the royal French pointy thing) on the helmets, and was reminded of home. Maybe when he threw that fateful interception, he was distracted by thoughts of the city. Maybe, just maybe, he dropped back to pass and thought about a tasty Café Du Monde begneit, or a muffalatta. Or, okay, maybe Reggie Wayne didn’t finish his route giving Porter a pretty easy INT. Who care!
THE SAINTS WON THE SUPER BOWL! Next year, it’s the Bengals turn.
