It’s not yet been a full news cycle since the Saints football season began and it’s already a side winding, master blasting, nail biting, heart beating, gully washing, teeth gnashing hurricane party.
In other words, just another Season of the Saints. Bless you boys. For the rest of us, fasten your seat belts.
Naturally, our season was not yet 30 minutes old before we got screwed by the refs on a call/no-call/was-there-even-a-call at the end of the first half?
If you didn’t see the game or the highlights and don’t know what I’m talking about, well, take comfort: Neither do I. Youtube it. I’ve watched the replay over and over and had it explained to me by people on TV who get paid a lot of money to explain things like this to me and, well, I still have no idea what happened.
But the show must go on, right? So then came the second half. And the lessons learned of pissing off our team in our house on a Monday night. And if Monday Night Football is hurting for ratings, they should just schedule the Saints every week.
What the hell is it with this team? Does it always have to be like this? So insane, uncertain, incomprehensible, unlikely and – since we’re talking about the weather – inclement? The only thing to take away from the game is that there’s nothing to take away from the game.
Are we really good or do we suck? Are we really lucky or forever cursed? Why can’t we just be regular, predictable champions like the Patriots and beat the crap out of everyone every Sunday and go home and kick our feet up and scratch the dog and eat a can of Pringles; cheat and steal and lie if we have to, be boringly spectacular and successful and better looking than everyone else, marry supermodels and get it done with – hoist the Lombardi Trophy every January and go fishing every March?
I’ll go ahead and answer what was originally meant to be a rhetorical question: No. Because we are New Orleans. We do things different here, right? That’s our job. Be unique. Be…colorful. It’s a heavier burden than America knows. The only thing certain in New Orleans is that nothing is certain in New Orleans.
(There you go, Fleurty Girl; there’s your next T-shirt.)
One thing we do know, the sure thing, the steady in the storm: Drew Brees is a man on fire. But that was already well presumed before Game Day. It is his default setting.
But add to that the gut-punching, eye-poked flabbergassery of how the past two seasons ended and you have, well, a man on fire. A man possessed. And a man pissed. A guy caught up in the kerfuffle of America’s culture war, a great guy cavorting with a not-so-great crowd and called out for it and then calling back and – let’s just say – the line is busy. Very busy.
And then during the ESPN broadcast they showed Steve Gleason, still there on the sidelines, still a Saint, still THE Saint, still rock steady – strength, grace, hope and equanimity defined, still the moral compass of this beat down town.
Jesus Breesus, what a man he is.
And so, as the Fates would have it, we won our first season opener since 2013. I just hope this is the first season since 2010 that we also win our last game.
Just a game you say?
Like hell it is.
Fasten your seat belts, Who Dat Nation. This ride is just getting started. The Saints are coming.
On that note, a fun fact: Did you know that this song was first released in 1979 by a Scottish band called The Skids? On the video, check out the lead guitar player in the white Miami Vice blazer on the right. He co-wrote the song. His name was Stuart Adamson. He was 19 when this video was made. After The Skids broke up, he started a new band that shook the charts in the mid ’80s.
They were called Big Country.
