Who Dat: Saints win wasn't just on the field

I'm not a big football fan, and I really don't have a team to pull for.

In baseball I have the Los Angeles Angels (a love affair that started in the mid-1960s) and Arizona Diamondbacks. In basketball I have the Lakers (dating back from their Jerry West/Elgin Baylor days) and Phoenix Suns.

The Rams were my hometown team growing up, but that's when Carroll Rosenbloom owned them and they called L.A. home. In Arizona we had the Cardinals, but it was pretty hard to feel good about a team that just pulled in from St. Louis and brought a bunch of lousy players with them. In my Arizona years, the director of the Cardinals offense was quarterback Tom (Pick Six) Tupa, who got his nickname from tossing six interceptions in one game. Pick Six was also a game in the Arizona State Lottery, only you had better odds buying one of those tickets than you did betting on the local team. A sorry lot, those Cardinals back then.

But I spent Super Sunday with my laptop open, banging out some work, with the game playing on the radio. And I nearly screamed my lungs out as the New Orleans Saints shocked everyone and beat the Colts to win the NFL title.

The Saints? Who dat? Who dey? What were they doing in the Super Bowl?

Back when the Rams were still in L.A., the Saints were horrible. They were about the only team those Cardinals could beat. The Aints.

But this year's Super Bowl was the biggest feelgood sports story you're going to hear for a long time. Less than five years ago, their city was torn apart by Hurricane Katrina. The city's population was cut in half from all the deaths, evacuations, and totally unlivable conditions. And in The Superdome, the Saints' home stadium, you got to see all the carnage close up.

Like everyone else then, I practically lived in front of the TV watching the Katrina footage. I saw the footage of riverboat casinos blown across parking lots in nearby Biloxi, and remembered a few friends of mine who worked there. Via the Weather Channel and news programs I saw the flooded streets of New Orleans, the destroyed houses marked with the number of dead people found inside, the looters breaking into stores. And the human devastation inside the Superdome.

I remember thinking that, after Katrina, it would be nearly impossible to get anyone to enter the Superdome again.

People died in that building.

Forget about football; a boy's game was the farthest thing from anyone's mind.

Survival was what it was all about, and the greatest gift anyone could give was a bottle of water.

Like many a good journalist, I'm a sucker for an underdog story. A story of redemption. And sometimes it's a sticky wicket. In the 2001 World Series I even considered pulling for those Yankees just because of 9/11. This is important to consider, because I'd rather eat a live bug than cheer for the folks in pinstripes. Fortunately, sanity -- and the Arizona Diamondbacks -- prevailed, and for the 35th year in a row I was rooting for the Yankees to get smoked.

This year's Super Bowl was a great story, five years in the making. Most of the story didn't happen on the gridiron.

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