A small plea but sincere plea...

Two weekends ago, I met a few friends at the apartment of another friend in Brooklyn to watch the wild card round of the NFL playoffs. All of us gathered there were Saints fans, guys who get together at a bar every Sunday in the fall and early winter to watch our beloved team play. On this day the Saints weren't playing, but there was a game taking place between the Arizona Cardinals and the Green Bay Packers that would determine who'd we play the following week, so what was taking place on television was kind of significant.

However, the highlight of that day, for all of us, wasn't anything that took place in the games being broadcast live. You see, at halftime of the first game, the friend who hosted the gathering announced that he'd downloaded the broadcasts of a few of the more memorable games, which are few sadly, in Saints football history. And so we watched a good portion of a 2000 playoff game against the St. Louis Rams that was at the time the first playoff win in our team's history, one of only three in total. Additionally, we watched a good bit of the Monday night game against the Atlanta Falcons in 2006, the team's first in the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina.

When we, all grown men, watched these clips, there were few, if any, dry eyes in the room. We have, perhaps irrationally, an undying and unconditional love for that football team, as do thousands of others who come from where we come from, and there's a bond that's so visceral that the emotional attachment feels sort of similar to the emotional attachment that many of us have with the first great loves our lives. We can move on and do other things, cheer for other teams in other sports, but no team moves us, I mean really moves us, quite like the Saints can. Many have written about how much the Saints mean to their fans, some very eloquently, but I've yet to read anything by anyone that really nails it, and I doubt that I ever will. I just don't think it's possible to put it into words. It's something that just has to be felt to be truly experienced.

Now, there was a point in my life where I felt sort of ashamed by this and, frankly, I thought maybe it wasn't all that healthy to invest so much of myself into a damn football team, and I'm sure that I'm not the other one who's questioned themselves in the same way. Needless to say, I got over it. Further, I learned to embrace it. Saints football is one of my favorite aspects of life, period, and I don't give a shit what anyone thinks about it.

In 30 hours or so, the New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings will play in the NFC championship game with the winner advancing to the Super Bowl. Like many of my fellow fans, I never truly thought I'd live to see the Saints play in the Super Bowl, and here we are now on the doorstep. I can't even begin to tell you how giddy and excited and anxious I am for the game to hurry up and start. Honestly, I'm a bit of a wreck right now. The minutes are just crawling by at a snail's pace and I'm sure tonight will be one of the longest sleepless nights I'll ever have because tomorrow will be, win or lose, a day I'll never forget, solely for the emotional rollercoaster I know it's going to be.

With all of that said, I, we, have a request: If you're not a fan of the Minnesota Vikings, please pull hard for our Saints to beat the Vikings. I mean, REALLY hard. I know, I know, you probably think it's "irrational" to believe that whether or not you, sitting on your sofa in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or in a bar in Birmingham, Alabama, pull for the Saints will have any effect on the outcome of a game played in New Orleans, Louisiana, but we don't believe that. We believe in the power of supernatural forces to create cosmic shifts in the universe (Hello, VOODOO!) especially when it comes to our football team. You have no idea how many items of clothing have been burned because they were worn on a day that the Saints lost a game, thus they were obviously cursed and needed to be destroyed. Duh.

So I, as a self-appointed representative of the Who Dat nation, would like to extend all of you a free ticket to ride on the Saints bandwagon from here until the final second ticks off the clock at the Super Bowl in Miami. After all the years we've suffered through miserable seasons, after a storm of biblical proportions just four years ago nearly washed away New Orleans and the stadium tomorrow's game will be played in, we need this. Hell, I'll even go so far as to say that we deserve it. And besides, from now until the end of my days I want to be able to tell people about how I got the fleur-de-lis that's tattooed on my right arm two days before the start of magical 2009 season that the Saints finally did go all the way.



Won't you please help us? Say it with me now..."WHO DAT!"