New Orleans Saints captured the attention of a nation

New Orleans Saints captured the attention of a nation

It wasn’t exactly the battle of the giants. There were no big-market teams, unlike two years ago when squads from New York and Boston faced off in the Super bowl.

And yet, the country cared. More people tuned in to watch the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts play in Super Bowl XLIV than have tuned in for any of the other 43 games. In fact, an estimated 106.5 million people tuned in Sunday evening breaking the record for any program that was set by the final episode of “M*A*S*H” in 1983.

We’d say it was a miracle, but there have far too many puns tied to the Saints already. But clearly, New Orleans — a city with a unique charm, a multicultural heritage and a back story written over the last four years as it has dug out from Hurricane Katrina — captured the attention of a nation.

The Saints are a team that started without a home field, playing in their first 17 years in Tulane’s stadium, and found themselves in 2005 without a stadium again. The Louisiana Superdome became a symbol known worldwide as a place where thousands found refuge after Hurricane Katrina left much of the city under water. The Saints split their 2005 home games between the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas, and LSU’s Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. Not that there were enough people in New Orleans with the time, disposable income or inclination to fill a football stadium anyway.

A new day dawned

But by September 25, 2006, after a commitment by the Saints ownership and the National Football League to keep a team in New Orleans, and after a $185 million renovation of the Superdome, the home opener was a sellout And the fans were rewarded with a 23–3 victory over the Atlanta Falcons

That was a harbinger of the better things to come for the Saints and their city, both of which received enormous support from the rest of the country. Even Alan Alda, star of “M*A*S*H,” didn’t begrudge the Saints his show’s ratings record. He chalked it up “to the fact that the whole country is rooting for New Orleans to triumph in every way possible ... I am, too, and I couldn’t be happier for them. I love that city.”

Of course, New Orleans still has a way to go in rebuilding. But this year’s 31-17 Super Bowl victory will be a mile marker along the way.

The city’s daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune went to extraordinary efforts to continue publishing through Katrina and was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Those of us at The Vindicator who have come to know many of the Times-Picayune staff were not surprised. Nor were we surprised that the paper’s coverage Monday under much happier circumstances resulted in a record for the best-selling edition in the newspaper’s 173-year history.

The paper, featuring a 5-inch-tall “Amen!” sold more than half-a-million copies.

New Orleans is becoming a city of thousands of daily success stories that will add up to one enormous accomplishment. On Tuesday, the city’s streets, once covered in mud, were thick with confetti as one of the greatest parades ever seen — in a city known for parades — carried more than 200 members of the Saints organization past hundreds of thousands of exuberant fans.

It was the kind of happy scene one would expect in New Orleans. But parades and championships don’t wipe out the pain of recent years; they only hold promise of the better days to come.