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NEW ORLEANS -- They didn't need to wait until the clock hit 0:00.When Tracy Porter took off with a Peyton Manning pass meant for Reggie Wayne, pushing the Saints' lead to 31-17 with just over three minutes left in the fourth quarter of this year's Super Bowl, the city of New Orleans took off, too, to a state of euphoria and overwhelming emotion.
There was an initial surge of joy in the Bourbon Street bar I watched the game in -- people leaping into each other's arms, falling over, jumping up and down with no concern for what happened to the contents of their cups. And then, after a minute, everybody looked at the scoreboard and the moment sunk in. The mood turned from festive to reflective.
That's when a twenty-something guy in an LSU T-shirt made eye contact with me and broke down.
"Man, I've never met you before," he said to me, "but my legs are shaking. I'm crying. I haven't cried in 14 years."
He just needed another human to share the meaningful moment with. It didn't matter who.
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Fourteen years is almost a blink of the eye compared to the 43 that it took for the Saints to bring a championship to New Orleans, a stretch of time marked with on-field ineptitude, embarrassment and lots of hope dashed by, at times, inexplicable misfortune.
In any other season in Saints history, that Manning pass to Wayne would have been complete. Or maybe it still would have been intercepted, but the Saints would have found a way to lose their two-touchdown lead and eventually the game anyway. And their fans would have felt it like a knife in the stomach. Because while it's easy to hear people talk about the connection between the city and the Saints and dismiss it as hyperbole, the Saints are a fabric woven deeply into the tapestry of New Orleans culture, and one of the most remarkable and unique things about New Orleans is the importance it places on culture.
So you could forgive the huddled masses if a few tears flowed. But there was still football to be played, so the proceedings were put on hold until the Saints took the victory formation and officially established themselves as a legitimate NFL team and, for a few months at least, the very best one.
And then the city did what it is famous for: it partied.
A flood of humanity washed onto Bourbon Street, beads raining down from people perched on balconies overhead. Ethnic, racial, economic and generational divides disappeared; strangers hugged, kissed, exchanged high-fives. From one sidewalk across the street to the other on every block in the French Quarter, the Who Dat Nation consolidated in celebration, making it impossible for anything -- people, cars, police on horseback -- to move at a speed any faster than a crawl. With their screams, their songs, they engaged in sweet release, purging the history of the Aints and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.
There wasn't the typical ugliness that you often find in other cities' championship celebrations -- no flying glass bottles, no overturned cars, no fistfights. No, Sunday night wasn't about destruction. Like the city and the football team that plays in it, the celebration in New Orleans on Sunday was about building: building goodwill, building something better, building the belief that stigmas -- whether it's the stigma that your city is defeated or your football team is cursed -- don't have to last forever.
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