New Orleans Saints fans are accustomed to zany events, and to heartbreak.
They aren’t accustomed to zany triumphs. But that, blessedly, is what they got in the Superdome in Monday night’s season opener, with the Saints blowing a game they seemed to have in hand, only to then win after they seemed to have lost. Even for fans jaded by 53 years of bizarre occurrences, this game was strange enough to leave them, at first, more dumbfounded than wildly exuberant.
Sure, when kicker Will Lutz won the game for the Saints with a 58-yard field goal as time expired, there was lots of cheering in the Dome. But there also were lots of disbelieving, almost blank expressions, as if it were hard to comprehend. Fans all over the Dome’s terrace, conditioned to having victory inexplicably stripped away, kept looking with morbid expectations for a penalty flag. Everyone knows Saints big plays always are negated by penalties.
Not this time. Finally, the realization of victory sank in. And then, everywhere one turned, there was laughter. Very little breast-beating and loud yelling; just big, wry smiles, and almost childlike laughter.
As most sports fans know, the Saints were denied a spot in last year’s Super Bowl by what may have been the worst missed call in NFL big-game history. At the end of the first half Monday night, the officials muffed another one, almost certainly costing the Saints a field goal.
Still, the Saints fought back from a 14-3 halftime deficit to take a 24-21 lead. On third and two from their own 15 with 2:08 left, with everyone expecting a run or short pass, quarterback Drew Brees launched the ball 38 yards downfield. Completion. Astonishing.
The Saints eventually kicked a field goal with 50 seconds remaining: 27-21. Somehow, though, the Saints’ secondary allowed Houston to complete two long passes, in just 13 seconds, for a touchdown and a one-point advantage, 28-27. This looked like typical Saints catastrophe in the making.
Now the Saints had only 37 seconds left. But Brees worked magic. Three completions and one timeout later, the Saints had reached Houston’s 40, with two seconds left.
Flashback: Forty-nine years ago, the only other time when zaniness broke in favor of the Saints, the same two seconds remained in old Tulane Stadium when head coach J.D. Roberts, a mid-season replacement in his very first game leading the league’s worst team, sent out a kicker with a club foot — literally, half a foot, with a special, squared-up kicking shoe — to try a 63-yard field goal. This was when almost no kickers ever were successful from longer than 50 yards, much less 60.
Saints fans listening on the radio — home games were “blacked out” on local TV back then — never heard the play. All they heard was a horrible, sudden buzzing noise. A swarm of bees, literally, bees, flew into the radio transmitter just as the ball was snapped. True story. Zany. But Tom Dempsey indeed made the kick.
Since then, the Saints have lost to a play called Big Ben, to a phantom pass interference call (even the opposing receiver said he wasn’t touched), to their own punter throwing a “pick six” interception in overtime, to their own missed extra point after a three-lateral 75-yard touchdown as time expired, to a whiffed tackle on a “Hail Mary” pass on the last play of the game, and to numerous other, only slightly-less-crazy football disasters. Crazy losses appear to be the team’s destiny.
But for one night at least, crazy worked in the Saints’ favor. This time, no bees. Just Brees — with a result as sweet as honey.
