Fat Sunday

We interrupt the regularly scheduled joyous hysteria visiting New Orleans on Fat Tuesday with an early bulletin: The New Orleans Saints — a team and a collective metaphor for the city it represents — won Super Bowl XLIV tonight.

That’s not a dispatch from the bizzarro world, as anyone who’s watched this spirited, inspired, talented team win and win and win all season already knows. It was the realest of real deals: 44 days after Christmas, 44 years after the Saints organization was first awarded an NFL franchise, the former whipping boy of the NFL won Super Bowl No. 44, defeating the Indianapolis Colts 31-17.

Fat Tuesday, Feb. 16, was already on the city’s calendar. You can call tonight Fat Sunday. Laissez les bon temps roulez, tout de suite.

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In a game that had analysts quietly licking their chops at the prospect of coronating Colts quarterback Peyton Manning as Perhaps the Greatest QB of All Time, the Saints spoiled the Colts party with one of their own.

Saints QB Drew Brees mixed it up the hard way, battling back despite an early 10-0 deficit, grinding it out play after play. The Saints combined dogged but spirited offense with opportunistic defense and Garrett Hartley, a field-goal kicker whose points after seemed almost laser-guided.

Saints head coach Sean Payton, who combined undeniable coaching skills with the guts of a burglar and the soul of a riverboat gambler, took risks in different ways throughout the game. Using everything from a smart (and successful) coach’s challenge to a timely reverse to the very act of gambling on Brees (who underwent shoulder surgery after the 2005 season) in the first place, Payton proved he wouldn’t play by the books.

It was most obvious tonight when the Saints, scoring a Hartley field goal in the second quarter to trail 10-6, started the second half with an onside kick.

A pre-fourth quarter onside kick, in the Super Bowl. Find that in the damn playbook. Who pulls shit like that? Payton’s crew does, and the Indianapolis Colts (anticipating the deep kick for a runback) were every bit as surprised as the TV analysts and the crowd at Florida’s SunLife Stadium. The Saints recovered the ball and started the second half of the game with a quick touchdown, and a serious shot to the psyche of the Colts. ESPN said it was the first successfully completed onside kick before the fourth quarter in Super Bowl history.

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Manning was off his feed much of the night; at times on the sidelines he seemed sullen, rattled and maybe even angry. And the Colts as a team were less than the sum of their well-oiled machine parts. The feared Colts defensive end Dwight Freeney spent much of the fourth quarter sidelined, nursing a still-healing torn ligament in his right ankle, offering himself as a testing aid to the trainers who practiced their taping skills on that ankle the rest of the game.

Little by little the tide turned and stayed turned. Hartley makes another field goal from deep space. Brees hits Jeremy Shockey for a TD that gives them the lead. Payton, bold again, successfully challenges the ruling that Lance Moore had not scored on the 2-point conversion. Saints 24-17.

Meanwhile, Colts kicker Matt Stover misses one from 51 yards out. Colts receiver Pierre Garcon drops a pass; later Garcon was called for offensive pass interference. In the aggregate, the Colts played a decent game, despite some key mistakes that on the whole weren’t more than any other team might post on any given Sunday.

But this was The Super Bowl. The Indianapolis Colts, who had posted stellar numbers all season en route to the best win-loss record in the NFL, had been playing like supermen. They picked the wrong game to turn into mere mortals.

It was all distilled in the last three minutes of the game. Down 24-17, Manning and the Colts mounted a feverish last-minute drive. Manning makes a short pass across the middle, a throw intended for Reggie Wayne. Not today. Looking for the main chance, Saints defensive back Tracy Porter intercepts the pass, and returns it 75 yards for a touchdown.

Game, set, match, title, party.

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It was hard not to be torn by deep, emotional — and, yeah, racial — affinities either way you placed your bets. You wanted to side with Indianapolis Colts head coach Jim Caldwell, one of only five rookie head coaches to reach the Super Bowl, and one of only three African American coaches (Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith are the others) to get to the big show.

But this year the stakes were bigger than victory for a team, more so than in any other Super Bowl in recent memory. What was at stake for New Orleans was its sense of itself, its idea of the possible four and a half years after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.

The Saints ain’t Aints no more

Sometimes you’re sure life can’t get any worse. You’re ready to holler and throw up both your hands and give up what’s left of your personal ghost. And then somebody — Somebody in High Places — throws you a bone with just enough on it to keep you going, keep you believing in the possibilities of the underdog.

That’s what happened earlier today. In the New Orleans Superdome, the scene of tragedy not long enough ago, the New Orleans Saints defeated the Minnesota Vikings 31-28 in the NFC Championship, to advance to the Super Bowl on Feb. 7, in the Saints’ first appearance there in the 44-year history of the franchise.

Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras is pretty much as automatic a party as this country ever has, but the scene there tonight promises to be wilder, more raucous than Mardi Gras will be. The Saints — for most of two generations the doormat of the NFL — is going to the big show two weeks from now. And the city of New Orleans realizes a shot in the arm that transcends money, pro football bragging rights and other superficialities.

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It was a shooting match for most of the game, with Saints quarterback Drew Brees and Vikings quarterback Brett Favre trading long bombs and spirited sprints out of the pocket. But the Vikings were the victims of mistakes that began in the third quarter and cascaded into a pattern of play that was hard to believe was coming from a playoff-caliber NFL team.

By the end of the fourth quarter, the wheels fell off for the Vikes, followed by the transmission, the brakes and everything but the catalytic converter. Fumbles. Quarterback hurries. More turnovers than a pastry shop. Favre was on the canvas 16 times that day, and was briefly out of the game earlier, due to an injury that looked horrific in the replay.

Favre, gamer that he is, came back into the contest. But just before overtime, the score tied at 28, you could sense something was going wrong when, driving for a decisive score, the Vikings were hit with a 5-yard penalty … for having 12 men in the huddle. The penalty almost certainly took them out of field-goal range, so Favre went with a pass play.

On third-and-15 from the New Orleans 38, Favre, desperate to get close enough to give Ryan Longwell a chance to win the game in last-second fashion, rolled to his right. Then, instead of running for the yardage that might have put the Vikes in field goal range, Favre threw across the field to the left … where the Saints’ Tracy Porter intercepted, sending the game to overtime.

A field goal by the externally unflappable Garrett Hartley, and the Saints were set to go marching into their first Super Bowl.

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“Just wondering if I can hold up, especially after a day like today,” said Favre, battered and ghostly, a man whose tank was drier than empty after the game. “Physically and mentally. That was pretty draining. I am going to go home, a couple of days and just talk it over with the family.”

Was it miscommunication or nerves? Was it performance anxiety, or maybe what Hunter S. Thompson used to call “the fear”? Who knows?

What we do know is as uncomfortable for Vikings fans as it is undeniable for everyone else: While Brett Favre — a top-notch competitor and a man we’ve come to love — wanted that NFC Championship victory, for any number of team and personal reasons, New Orleans needed that victory, needed it deeply for reasons that are plain to anyone who remembers the brutal, chaotic events of five summers ago in the state of Louisiana.

The NFC Championship win is the latest good news for the region. In November, citing “monumental negligence,” U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr., opened the door to an expected torrent of lawsuits against agencies of the federal government, lawsuits representing the first real evidence of justice for human beings needlessly displaced by the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

The four individuals and one business in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish were awarded $720,000 by Duval, resolving a lawsuit brought against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. More suits can certainly be expected.

But all that’s on the long come. More immediately, dead ahead, is New Orleans’ second-line dance into the first rank of winning NFL franchises, and the chance to tweak its own salute to the team, to make it a salute to the city the water couldn’t wash away:

Who Dat say Nawlins is finished?

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Image credits: Saints logo: New Orleans Saints/National Football League. Saints celebration: Michael C. Hebert/New Orleans Saints. Favre: AP Photo.