Who Dat Nation!

Yeah, I blog a lot about the Seattle Seahawks, who are my team of choice. But in my family we also keep the Saints as our back up team. I mean hello, one of the guys playing for them has the same name as my dad. I have a lot of other personal reasons for giving the Saints mad love and respect. Drew Brees is a class act all the way around and I can't think of a quarterback I would have liked to see in a superbowl as much as my own, that isn't him. Also I'm just a little in love with Scott Fujita, politically. Seriously, he's almost the perfect man.

But there is more to it than all that.

When Hurricane Katrina happened I was home visiting my folks and I remember watching the storm start and my heart just sinking. It looked so flipping awful and I do have a handful of friends back there. I spent the next few weeks watching that city get first destroyed and then get redestroyed by shoddy relief efforts. I cried watching these images on television of Americans suffering in their own country and watching the people who were supposed to protect them, ignore them. I mean really, four days to get relief down there? Stupid. Short sighted. Wrong. Those are the gentlest words I can use.

About two years ago I saw the show No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain and he did a New Orleans episode and even still things down there aren't fixed completely. And it stirred up the same anger and sadness in me that watching the initial hurricane did.

It seems silly, especially if you don't follow sports how much the Saints mean to these people, especially this year. But it means everything to a lot of them. A good friend of mine is a huge Saints fan and he has family in Louisiana and is still angry, obviously, about how Katrina was handled. Yesterday was probably one of the happiest days he's had in a long time. He was on the phone with his family off and on through the game and it was pretty touching. Hell, I remember watching them reopen the Superdome a few years ago and just bawling, because the people there were so excited to have it back.

We partied. We had a blast. We cheered for the Saints. I cheered for an entire city of people who got hosed by Mother Nature a few years ago. I thought of you Louisiana. I thought of the people there.

And yeah, we drank a lot of beer too. There was that.