Super Bowl LX (or “60” if you’re not Roman) will kick at 5:30 Louisiana time Sunday, and not participating will be the New Orleans Saints, a sad fact decided back around Labor Day as the “team” started 1-7 and finished 6-11.
There was a time when six wins in a Saints season would have been a cause for optimism. But that all changed on February 7, 2010, when the Saints, 13-3 after the 2009 season, handed the 4-point favorite Indianapolis Colts, 14-2, their hats in Super Bowl XLIV.
For 43 years, it had been love unrequited. Saints fans kept showing up. The team didn’t always do the same. And when they did, fans left with the feeling they’d forked over their money and their hearts without getting so much as a card or a kiss.
There were 34 losing seasons in 43 long years. There were 1-15 campaigns. There were 8-8 seasons that caused, all things being relative, manic joy. There were even playoff appearances, but those were just dust in the wind.
No kisses.
Not until February 7, 2010. After 43 seasons of misery, the Saints won Super Bowl 44.
Grown Cajuns wept and old ladies trembled in their jersey-wearing bosoms, both overwhelmed by a relief known only to the loving, to the loyal, and to the ever hopeful who’d cheered for, cursed, and loved the Black and Gold.
Consummation Sunday.
Was it worth the wait? Alfred Tennyson said, in that silver-tongued way of his, that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. There were times you’d have had a hard time convincing Saints fans of that. But in remembering that day, that season, you can bet your hat and your jock strap that it was all worth it. Every gut-wrenching second of every hair-pulling season of every mind-numbing decade.
Saints 31, Colts 17.
Super Bowl Champions.
What made it so special? What removed it from being just another hum-drum Super Bowl game, from another national championship or another pro sports title? What made Super Bowl XLIV, at the time, the most-watched television show ever? Why did so many people care?
Maybe the poets can help us understand …
“Love is blind.” We’ve all heard it. We’ve all said it. We just don’t know who said it first. It’s an anonymous proverb.
It’s anonymous because no one would admit to being the first to say something that stupid.
If love were blind, Archie Manning’s own sons wouldn’t have asked their mom if they could join the Superdome chorus that early 1980s afternoon. While the Saints lost yet another game on their way to a 1-15 season, the ages 4 and 6 sons of The Greatest Saint of Them All looked at a very pregnant (with Eli) Olivia Manning and said, “Can we boo too, Mom?”
Love sees the warts. For years, fans of the Saints saw and verbally acknowledged their team’s shortcomings. They did not turn a blind eye to fumbles, to sacks, to sieve defenses and 25-watts offenses. They did not hide their frustrations from on-field train wrecks and front office foibles.
They wore grocery sacks on their heads and called their team “The ‘Aints.”
Denial is blind. Denial says, “Oh, that’s OK; we’ll be fine.” But with alarming clarity, true love sees that we blew it in the draft, that we’ll be killed by free agency and that our offensive line can’t block air — but true love holds on tightly and hopes anyway. Love says, “They’re terrible and they’re the ‘Aints, but they’re OUR ‘Aints.”
“He is not a lover who does not love forever.” Euripides said that. Euripides was a Greek playwright who knew nothing about football but a lot about the heart of a Saints fan.
These fans were embraced by America because they booed when booing was due and embraced when booing was due. These people didn’t give up. These fans withstood a hurricane, a season without a team, a season with just a piece of a city! But they kept coming back for more. These fans were football realists living in a bit of a carnival city.
The only other NFL fans who can even have a conversation with Saints fans are the ones in Detroit, who have had a team since there were 13 colonies and still haven’t sniffed a Super Bowl. But the difference here? Detroit has the Red Wings. And the Pistons. And the Tigers. Detroit is a city with some championship banners hanging around. Even the Lions won four or five NFL championships back in the day of the leather helmet.
No, the Saints fans are in a league by themselves.
Through 43 years of unsightly escapades, Saints fans kept showing up. Loving, though thin and thinner. No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold. And that might be true. But we know this: a heart can hold at least 43 years worth of disappointment and still be filled with love. Saints fans knew their Dome Patrol defense had no offense, and they knew their offense of ’06 had no defense. But somehow, Saints fans for years held on loosely to what the Saints were, and tightly to the dream of what they could become.
American Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather reminds us that “where there is great love, there are always miracles.” I’m not sure when she said that; maybe it was November of 1970, right after club-footed Tom Dempsey kicked the record 63-yard field goal in Tulane Stadium to beat Detroit.
At that point, with the Saints franchise only four seasons old, New Orleans fans hadn’t had enough football experience to be overly happy or overly sad. Of course, time and fumbles and interceptions would take care of that.
The honeymoon, it seemed, would never come.
But then February 7, 2010 dawned, a Sunday that bloomed Saints’ Black and Gold. For young Saints fans and fans of pure football, the Saints’ title was one to toast, to appreciate or drink and party to.
But for others, for the diehards, it was more than that. People who don’t understand that athletics can be more than just a game just don’t understand how a human heart works.
There is a guy in Shreveport and another in Sterlington and a lady in Gretna and another in Port Allen, each in their 70s and all bound by years of frustration but now, because of that special Saints Sunday, bound by a Saints Super Bowl win. These are the kinds of people who remember Kilmer’s wobbly passes and Dempsey’s kick and Archie’s rookie season. These are your card-carrying Saints Fans. And the ones in New Orleans proper, the ones who battled losing seasons and losing all their possessions in Katrina, they’re in a special league of fan. I’m not sure any other fans in sports history had taken such a ride.
Maybe they won’t have to wait 43 years for another one. And maybe Providence does care about football after all, at least just a little bit.