The city welcomes its team home.
You can’t really argue with the results: the Saints were the team of the season, and they deserved the Super Bowl. Personally, I couldn’t be more satisfied with their victory this year — it was almost as if my very own Chiefs won it.
I spent an entire day thinking about why I felt that way. And it’s because this was not just a victory for a football team, and it wasn’t just a victory for a recovering American city. It was a victory for sports.
The sports we care about carry a place in our heart that partly detaches from the everyday events that surround us, but not completely. Professional sports, in particular.
Even during a recession, players get record contracts and franchise owners achieve untold financial success — sure their profits dip, but that’s not going to prevent a new add-on to Arrowhead Stadium, now is it? There could be another terrorist attack on New York tomorrow (God forbid), but that passrushing attack is going to be as lethal next season as ever, and the Giants will still be a good, proud franchise with sell out crowds. The difference between the world of professional sports and our world is profound.
Of course, this has negative effects that can’t be ignored. Players, officials, and coaches occasionally seem tonedeaf to what people who don’t share their lifestyles are like. Players will start feuds with entire cities, coaches will say silly things, all because they can afford to do these things in the bizarre world of professional sports. You can strangle your coach or slap a peer and still keep your job. You can gouge somebody’s eyes and only get suspended one half of a game, and it still won’t hurt your Draft stock in any significant way. Not to mention you can make millions and millions of dollars just because you’re really good at a game, while perfectly talented bloggers (just to throw out some totally random profession) have to work two jobs to make ends meet.
But that same detachment has its merit. It can be a wonderful distraction. Cramming themselves in that Superdome and cheering for a wonderful, almost-perfect offense and a opportunistic defense (as resilient as New Orleans!) gave people much-needed-and-rarely-awarded time to forget about the piles of wreckage that still decorated many residential street corners. And the success or failure of any sports franchise has nothing to do with how a particular city may be prospering, but instead on how well it runs its business model. Struggling cities can have winning teams, and this can build a solidarity in rough times like few things can. New Orleans, when in pain, fed off the energy of its up-and-coming pro football team.
In addition to that, the Saints (mainly through the peerless Drew Brees) have done everything they can to eliminate that detachment. This is a team that represented a city in ways more profound than simply being stationed there. Through tragedy, this team became the city, both through its efforts to reach out to the city and through the city’s desperation to find something it could pride itself on again. I don’t need to reel off the hundreds of ways this happened. It just did, and we all saw it, and we saw it all the time.
Even though it still requires massive work to rebuild, New Orleans is spiritually rebuilt right now, however temporarily. And I think the Super Bowl win, and this team in general, has had more than a little to do with that.
The Saints winning the Super Bowl reminds us of the unique power of sports in our lives. And that power that is, in my humble opinion, the very best thing about sports. And it’s a beautiful frickin’ thing.
Go Chiefs. Go Saints.