I trust After the Levees readers have had enough time to savor Boyd's post (below). I thought I'd provide a little more on Super Saints Monday:

Here's an excerpt from an article titled "Saints' defense blows Falcons away" in Tuesday's Times Picayune:

The forces of nature brought this city to its knees a little more than a year ago, but its football team brought a still-teetering region to its feet Monday night.

And the afterglow of a resounding 23-3 nationally televised victory over their archrival not only put the Saints atop the NFC South with a 3-0 record, but quite possibly shook all of New Orleans out of it's post-Katrina funk and placed it on a clear path toward its ultimate renaissance.

It's quite a remarkable statement to make in a sports article. "Clear path"? "Ultimate renaissance"? Pretty ambitious talk, there. And you'll find no examples or evidence in the rest of the article to support such a far-flung conjecture.

Yet, I don't totally disagree with it.

The game was the most-watched program in the history of ESPN, the "highest-rated program of the night on any network, broadcast or cable", and garnered the second largest cable audience ever. If you consider the pregame and the repeated highlights on all the sports shows Tuesday, and all the national media coverage, you could say that Super Monday was one long, memorable, positive advertisement of New Orleans. For a nation that experienced Katrina as a week-long television event showcasing suffering, ineptitude, frustration... this was a much-needed "hopeful" coda that had been missing from the "Katrina narrative" for over a year. In grand fashion, New Orleans was able to show the rest of the country that we're working hard to come back as an event city, a tourist city, a functioning city. Over all, I'd say ESPN's coverage of the "Super Monday" was very sympathetic and rightly acknowledged that the game itself was secondary to the larger issues in post-Katrina New Orleans.

But, but, but Mark... a national telecast doesn't strengthen our levees. A football game doesn't rebuild damaged homes....

Well, no kidding. Last Monday Night was about group therapy. It was about boosting civic morale. But it was also about business. Anyone want to estimate the economic impact of this "quasi-Super Bowl"? I will confidently assert that it's well over $20 million, all things considered. How important was this game to hotels and restaurants, especially after a lethally slow summer? I would imagine the scale of this football game became a welcome "surprise" development for many of these industries. I wouldn't be surprised if all the positive publicity leads to enhanced tourism across the board, as well as one or two conventions that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

And yes, maybe, ideally, we should have all our priorities in the perfect order and we should be collectively gutting houses rather than watching burly millionaires wrestling over pigskin. And maybe New Orleanians should also be gutting houses instead of celebrating Carnival. But if you subtract things like the Saints and Mardis Gras, then this place ceases to be New Orleans.

It's not easy for outsiders to understand that Carnival was a profound experience back in February; and so was this Saints game. I had tears of joy during both.

New Orleanians are not about efficiency. We are about having fun. Sometimes we dance when we should be working or sleeping-- even after a disaster. But we have fun, and people like to have fun with us, and our city is willing to accomodate those other funlovers, because we are in the "business of fun". And Monday was hugely stimulative for our business.

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I feel it necessary to say more... (Ok, first, lemme explain something: even though I consider myself a New Orleanian, and have lived here for a decade, and am becoming irrevocably woven into the fabric of the city, in many ways I'm still just a student of New Orleans. So, I often say "we" but you should realize that I don't speak for lifelong New Orleanians. In subtle but significant ways, I could be way off when I describe the culture here.) As a mere student, though, I feel it necessary to say that yes, we live in a tourism-based city that's in the "business of fun". However, don't be fooled into thinking that "fun-loving" New Orleanians are simple, superficial hedonists. In certain ways, I would instead liken New Orleanians to the Ancient Greeks whom Nietzsche venerated. We're superficial: out of profundity!

We understand that Lent comes after Carnival, and that football games don't fix broken levees (and schools and streets). But we also understand that a celebratory dance can (and should) follow a funeral. And Monday night, there was dancing in the Dome-- and the celebrants understood why it was a profound New Orleans experience, and don't need to be reminded that they have work to do after the dancing stops.

Yes, Ash Wednesday will always follow Fat Tuesday. Thank you, professors of the obvious-- We get that.

But there are REASONS why we celebrate like we do. There are REASONS why we come together in a rebuilt arena and wear costumes and yell so loud we forget who we are and chant in unison, and deliriously hug people we've never met when our "boys" cross certain white lines on the field. There are REASONS to have memorable, emotional, unifying experiences with thousands of other people in a catastrophe-stricken city. The Superdome wasn't merely a place where we could vent our many frustrations. No, the pretext was the football game, but folks instinctively knew that this gathering was becoming an important cultural celebration of rebirth and renewal. And that "New Orleans emotion" intensified enough to pierce through the corporate "veil" of a Monday Night Football telecast into millions of homes. But it wasn't just "raw" emotion. I think many viewers understood that New Orleanians are culturally unified in profoundly deep and unique ways. So, the delirium at the Dome was like the jazz dance outside the cemetery... we believe it is appropriate and important to celebrate like that-- especially after a tragedy! And... quite simply, no one else does it like we do.

We invite you to come see for yourself.

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Update: Ashley and Mark have much more.