People lined up by the hundreds to buy yesterday's issue of The Times-Picayune, which hollered "AMEN!" from its front page. The Saints' Super Bowl victory was a prayer answered in this struggling city, and New Orleans itself seemed different for it.
Swarms of fans in black and gold greeted the players as they stepped off a chartered plane at the suburban airport, cheering them with "Who Dat!" chants. The Saints, cellar dwellers for decades, delivered not just their first Lombardi trophy but optimism for their city, a new sense that the unimaginable -- better schools, less crime and even honest politicians -- really is possible.
"The Saints kept hope alive in this city that better days were coming," said Shannon Sims, a 45-year-old criminal-court administrator in the crowd. They "were the force that kept us moving forward."
Hurricane Katrina battered the Saints and even knocked them out of town for a while, as it did to many New Orleanians. Now the team is better than ever, and its hometown fans hope to follow suit.
"It shows the rest of the country that we have resilient people and this is a city of winners," said Dwight Henry, 46, a co-owner of the Buttermilk Drop bakery near the Lower 9th Ward, one of the areas hardest hit by Katrina.
"Since Katrina, we've been able to start successfully from the bottom," said Henry, whose business was severely flooded. "We couldn't go anywhere lower."
The win was not just about football for New Orleans, said John Magill, a historian at Historic New Orleans Collection.
"We're all being told that we're sinking, why bother rebuild it, there was so much of that attitude," Magill said. Thanks to the Super Bowl win, he said, Americans will view the city in the positive light it deserves.
The day before the game, the city elected a new mayor in Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, the son of the majority-black city's last white mayor. Landrieu won with 66 percent of the vote, getting votes across racial lines.
Hope is high that Landrieu will lead the city in the right direction. About 80 percent of its pre-Katrina population has returned and hundreds of millions of dollars in rebuilding money still has to be spent, but the murder rate remains high, and the city's levees have not been fully rebuilt.
For now, though, it seems the sky's the limit, and the Saints' 31-17 upset of the Indianapolis Colts is the reason.
It looked like a wild Carnival parade yesterday along a nondescript strip of road leading from the airport where the team's airplane touched down.
Thousands of fans lined the road with their Saints jerseys, "Who Dat!" chants, homemade signs, fleur-de-lis garb, face paint and Mardi Gras costumes (such as the Saint-a Claus fellow). Coach Sean Payton held the Lombardi trophy aloft through the sunroof of his car, eliciting wild screams.
At the airport, 37-year-old courier Aaron Washington said "the dawn of a new day" had come. A brass-band version of "When the Saints Go Marching In" blared from his car stereo.
"This team has allowed us to get past Katrina and look forward to better things," Washington said. He watched the game with a number of friends and relatives on a big-screen television in front of a home in eastern New Orleans that was rebuilt after the 2005 hurricane flooded it with 9 feet of water.
The Lower 9th Ward erupted in jubilation, with neighbors hugging and screaming.
"It felt really good," said Ann Schexnyder, a 51-year-old dental lab technician. "They've come along and we've come along."
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