Girod Street End Zone

Sorry this has taken so long.  To be blunt, I am still just processing everything we all went through for the last week or so, and the month before that, and the season and training camp before that, and the 43 years before that.

At least, I guess you all saw the game, yes?  I can thus spare you most of the now-dissected-and-rehashed technical details, although I am sure Claude will have some numbers for you later.  Instead, The Goat will provide

Impressionist Notes From Miami

As I mentioned last week, The Goat was In That Number in Miami.

Secret Agent Man.  Without getting into a lot of detail, accept for a minute that about 30 minutes before Super Bowl kickoff, I was being taken to my stadium gate in a golf cart.  (No arrest involved.)  Driver was one of those official cap-and-windbreaker security guys, doesn’t say a word.  Right before I got out, stone truth, he looked at me solemnly and said, “They told us not to say anything.  But we’re all pulling for you guys.”

It was that kind of night.  In reality, the Colts had no chance from the moment they walked off the plane.

Out-of-body experience no. 1:  Walking out into the stadium and looking up and seeing the fleur-de-lis on the scoreboard.  Us?  Not somebody else?  It’s our turn?

Some People Just Don’t Belong:  In case you thought your ears were deceiving you during the game, it was in fact as close to a home game as we could have made it.  We were in the end zone (not the one Tracy Porter ran into on the pick-six, the other one), in a section of about 650 people.  My best guess is that there were 20 Colts fans:  after the Colts scored their first-quarter TD, about 20 scattered Colts jerseys popped up out of their seats like blue prairie dogs in a field of black shirts, twisting around looking to high-five some other lonely guy in a blue jersey three rows over and two up before they popped back down in their holes. 

Stephen Hawking in The House:  On the other hand, once we got rolling, particularly in the second half, the house was ours.  Contrast the prairie-dogging Colts fans to the explosion when Porter stepped in front of that pass.  It was like a bomb went off under the section and tossed everybody into the air.  Time slowed down, the laws of physics changed, everyone was shouting but the sound was so loud and so distant at the same time, the entire section was jumping up and down and screaming, high-fiving and hugging in front, in back, to my left, the guy behind me again, the two Vietnamese strippers in front of me, the guy behind me to my right, again and again, jumping up and around and and shaking our fists in the air and just screaming and screaming and screaming.  In about 90 seconds, we doubled the universe’s aggregate output of catharsis since the dawn of time.

“I want you to get up…..get up out of your seats….”:  The Goat enjoyed his greatest Howard Beale moment, even without the raincoat and wet hair.  As the fourth quarter is starting, the Colts, then up 17-16, approach the line of scrimmage early in their doomed march to the missed Matt Stover field goal.  Like a goddamn lunatic, I climb up with one foot on the back of the seat in front of me and the other on the back of my own seat and twist around to look at all the rows behind me, waving my arms and looking people behind me in the eye and screaming “GET UP!! GET UP!!”  A number of people looked at me like I was nuts (hard to believe), but….get up a bunch of them did.  They were probably going to get up anyway (most of us stood the whole second half while we were on D, just like in the Dome), but, what the hell, I felt better about the whole thing.  On the other hand, I should probably feel happy I wasn’t arrested. 

 Out of body experience no. 2:  Looking up at a Super Bowl scoreboard that read

SAINTS 31     COLTS 17       4       3:12

And here I was last week bragging about The Goat knowing dreams.

Misty, water-colored memories:  One more note on the pick:  an old and dear friend asked if perhaps a part of me would have preferred being at a party or bar with old friends in N.O. for the game.  In the main, I think that’s probably right…but I have two thoughts.  First, goofy as it sounds, I really wanted to be there to help, not so much that we could make the Colts go to a silent count, but just to let the team know we were there, and I just had to be a part of that.  Call me a naif.  (Actually, if you do, I will probably start waving my arms and screaming “GET UP!! GET UP!!” at you.  I may make this my new hobby.)  Second, as great as it was on TV (and I have only seen the replay 29 times since I got home), being in the house for that pick, and literally directly behind Porter watching it unfold as he broke in on that pass, is pretty much what I have spent my whole sporting life looking for, and now that it’s in my head, it’s mine forever and nobody can ever take it away.

Harvesting for The Bandwagon:  If you weren’t in our corner by the time Tracy Porter crossed the goal line, you had a plane ticket back to Indiana in your pocket.  For instance, the guy in front of me was from Detroit, nice guy, big sports fan wearing a Red Wings ball cap, a business owner who won a Super Bowl trip in his trade association raffle, not really caring who won, just “wanted to see a good game”.  In the first half, he was pleasantly conversational.  Right after the half, he was clapping when we recovered the onside kick.  By the fourth quarter, he was on his feet hollering through cupped hands while Manning was trying to audible.  By Wednesday, he had emailed me pictures of us standing together after the game holding our index fingers in the air, and declared he had pretty much decided to be a Saints fan. 

Hey, Joe…:  No, I’m not skipping over the strippers.  The only two unoccupied seats at kickoff as far as I could see were the two seats in front of me and Mrs. The Goat.  All of a sudden, right at the end of the first quarter two five-foot, ninety-pound Asian girls with mesh baseball caps of unknown origin, dime-store Brees jerseys and some reasonably serious tats plunked down in the two seats in front of us.  Yay, team!  I mean, they just had to be, right?  All I know is, we were down 10-0 when they sat down, and we outscored the Colts 31-7 the rest of the game.  Based strictly on the results, I proposed to buy them both right on the spot to sit in front of me at all future post-season games, but Mrs. The Goat, who just does not understand football like I do, left me a subtle suggestion that it might be a problem in the long run.  Something about a salary cap, I think.  Or maybe it was how far you can get on half a salary.  I was just sorry I had given the guy from Detroit my last business card.  I want to win again in Dallas next year.

Teenage Kicks:  The great finishing kick:  leaving Miami wearing my battered old 90s (New Era, are they still even in business?) Saints ballcap and brand spanking new Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints T-shirt on to the plane and then walking through the Philly airport having everybody check out the shirt.  Want to feel fourteen years old again?  Forget Cialis.  Have your team win its first Super Bowl after 43 years of waiting.  Even getting dressed in the morning is fun.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Every Saints fan’s experience is uniquely theirs, and yet it’s completely shared; this is the tightest crew of fans in American sport. 

Forty-three years is long enough to take up whole lives, but not so long that even the youngest fans are without memories of parents or grandparents who were there at the beginning, sharing memories about Gilliam, Kilmer, listening to non-televised pre-season games on the radio, Dempsey, Archie, walking through uptown carrying stadium seats and ponchos. 

And there are really no other teams in town.  This is it.  This is our tribe, this is our gang.  Losing doesn’t drive you apart, it brings you closer.  We lost more than decades of games, four-five years ago we almost lost the stadium, the team, the city.  This is probably about as close as you wanna be.

The thing is, we really don’t need the words any more.  You see another Saints fan now, you don’t need to say anything.  You just know, and you know they know, and you know it together.   All the sportscasters and talk-show hosts and bloggers and newspaper columnists have said so much and they still can’t cover all that’s exchanged in simple eye contact and a big fucking smile.

We backed these guys for 43 years, literally through hell on earth, and when they finally came through, they did it the right way, with the right people, leading the conference wire-to-wire and running the playoff table without any wacky breaks, lucky calls or any other deus ex machina.   And they did it under the banner of an unqualified declaration on behalf of their fans.  If we were ever going to win a Super Bowl, it couldn’t possibly have come off any better than this.  And we did.

I have always loved being a Saints fan.  Never more so than now.

GO SAINTS GO!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 1:12 am and is filed under The New Orleans Saints. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.