Some time ago, I promised some regular blogging about the New Orleans Saints. The Saints have now lost the first three games of the season and looked unspeakably horrible doing it. They may be the worst team in football. I suspect I may not be inspired to blog about them much this season, so I figure I’ll get it all out of the way now. (Non-football fans are excused from this post.)

One of the few downsides of last year’s miraculous season — in which the most downtrodden franchise in professional football, perennial losers, somehow blossomed into one of the league’s best teams, playing truly artful and beautiful football and getting within one game of the Super Bowl after the crushing blow of Hurricane Katrina — is that the Saints have the capacity to make Louisianans sad again. Year after year of failure make even mediocrity aspirational. You get used to losing, and 8-8 seems like a blessing. But a brilliant year gets hopes up. The Saints were heroes, honest-to-goodness heroes to an entire state. And now their miserable start — and it has truly been miserable, bafflingly miserable — feels like a kick to the kidneys every week.

But even more depressing: Now Deuce McAllister, the heart and soul of this team for the past seven years, a local product, and one of the best guys in football, has blown out his knee and is done for the season. Probably forever, realistically having blown out the other knee just two years ago and having already been a noticable step slow this year. It’s just depressing.

Two quick Deuce memories. The first is from his earlier days with the Saints, when he was perhaps the key mover in one of the most brilliant plays in NFL history, the River City Relay. Of course, in classic Saints fashion, the brilliance was ruined moments later when the Saints’ kicker missed the biggest gimme in sports — the extra point after a touchdown. (The Saints would have made the playoffs that year had the kick been good.)

Finally, a happier one, from January, when Deuce completely dominated the biggest Saints game ever played in New Orleans, the second-round NFC playoff game against the Eagles. He generated 163 yards of offense and scored two touchdowns — one of them arguably the most inspiring run in Saints history, when he was driven to a dead stop at the five-yard line, but kept churning and working and pumping his legs until he had driven five determined Eagles defenders into the end zone. Here’s not-so-good video of it:

Then came the final key play of the game. Third down and one to go, 1:37 left to play. If the Saints could get one more yard — or, as every Saints fan was chanting at the moment, “ONE! MORE! YARD!” — the Saints would get a first down, run out the clock, and win. The handoff went, of course, to Deuce. Who rushed for five yards. Five being a number greater than one, as you may be well aware.

Here’s the TV version of it:

But here’s the view from the stands, which gives you a better idea of what an amazingly cathartic moment it was for the people of New Orleans.

Which led to scenes like this and this into the wee hours of the morning.

Of course, the Saints lost the next weekend. But even that generated moments like this for our quarterback Drew Brees:

It was nearing three a.m. when Brees walked up the steps of the Uptown New Orleans home he and his wife, Brittany, had bought the prior winter…[Brees] had taken the team charter back to New Orleans and driven himself home from the airport. The drive, normally 30 minutes, had taken him nearly two hours. Saints fans had lined the road from the team’s private air terminal, forming a two-mile collection of cars and people and banners and umbrellas. Brees had inched along in his car, signing autographs and shaking hands while people thanked him for turning in the best season of his six-year NFL career — one that earned him the starting quarterback’s job in the Pro Bowl — and for leading the Saints to their best season in the team’s 39-year history. For hurricane-weary New Orleans, the Saints’ success could not have come at a better time.

The fans at the airport were just the beginning, though. When Brees got home to his empty house, he found that he wasn’t really alone, after all. “I had balloons tied to my front door,” Brees says, recalling the scene…“I had cookies sitting on my porch. I had brownies. I even had gumbo there, in a Tupperware container, on my front doorstep. Only in New Orleans are you going to have one of your neighbors leave you gumbo on your doorstep. It’s pretty awesome.”

This season, the Saints were the chic pick to make the Super Bowl. See, it’s not proper to get a city’s hopes up like that and then go 0-3.

25 September 2007

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