Nick Marinello is a writer living and working in New Orleans.
About a week after the Super Bowl, I woke up one morning laughing. The evanescent memory of the game had caught a spark again somewhere within my dozy consciousness, and I lay there laughing for no other reason than that the Saints had won and it was good.
And really, there is nothing better than good. Good is grounding, good is nurturing, good joins our hands and points us in the right direction.
For all these reasons it was a good football season and these are good times. Call it karma, kismet, destiny, or God’s will, it surely does feel like there is something at play in this city, something that is both beyond and eminently part of our everyday affairs.
Of course, you can see it not so much as miraculous as mathematical. Maybe it’s just the law of averages finally evening things out. I can’t remember when I finally stopped crying after Katrina, but I know I was visited by tears almost daily for a year and maybe more. Perhaps we’re all due a few laughs.
I’m thinking now of something I read during the football season. Billy Kilmer, the team’s very first quarterback who led the Saints in those primal, dark years characterized by so much frustration and heartbreak, shared with the Times-Picayune his take on the several lucky breaks the Saints received in their improbable come-from-behind 33-30 victory against the Washington Redskins:
“Every time the ball bounced their way, I said, ‘Dadgum, you owe us one of those. You owe us plenty of those.’”
Dadgum, Billy, here I go tearing up again even as I type your words. And it feels so very, very good.
