The Catskill Chronicle

New Orleans saints fans at a home game in the Super Dome. SCOTT THRELKELD / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE

February 9, 2010

The Saints had their victory parade and we didn’t go. There it is – the big sin.

We were about the only people in the whole city who didn’t turn out except for my friend F who never goes out at night. I’m ashamed that we didn’t go and I whine and say that it was cold (it was) and really crowded (it was) and we would have to stand squished amid strangers (we would) and never really get to see the floats or Drew Breez or Sean Payton (we wouldn’t) and just shout “Who Dat?” until we couldn’t talk anymore (we would). But the truth is that we missed an experience.

Everyone had been getting ready for this Saints celebration for a while. The day before the event, when I went to the corner store around noon there were two ladies sitting out on the side walk in canvas chairs with a big pitcher of Bloody Marys. “Who Dat?”, they called out to me ritually as I walked by, and “We Dat!”, I enthusiastically responded as we exchanged high fives. There must have been millions of these exchanges all over the city, and multiplied many times over on the route of the parade itself, for in truth, very few people could have seen the actual parade – they were there to congratulate one another and to bear witness.

All the downtown streets and the side streets and the streets leading up to those streets were filled with people. You could see it on television and you could see it from the window. People drove their cars into the city from the suburbs and parked miles from the parade and walked. It was like Woodstock, actually, when thousands of people believed that the magic of being together in this benevolent celebration was a turning point. But really, Woodstock was trivial by comparison. This was more like the end of WW II. The Saints players are “Our Boys”, and there are signs everywhere saying, “Bless Our Boys.” The Times Picayune’ front page for the Monday after the Super Bowl had a single word headline – “Amen.” Cars and trucks taped this front page to their rear windows. There is a sense of “the boys” having played not for themselves but for the greater cause of New Orleans’ future, and, indeed, Drew Breez, the star quarterback said, “We didn’t do this for ourselves. We did it for our city.”

It was an experience of a whole city and it’s neighboring parishes and even states, telling themselves and everybody else that everything was going to be OK now because they won a football game. And not just OK, but loving and successful and innovative and resourceful and, yes, brave and faithful and true. All because the Saints won the Super Bowl. And maybe they are right, because they will never forget this moment when they all believed in themselves, and history is powerful.