Party Time!

By Ivette Ricco

 Silly Wabitt..
The New Orleans Saints stunned the NFL on Super Bowl Sunday.
Saints fans everywhere could finally call themselves champions and remove their paper bags, Aints No More.

The Who Dat Nation will be partying right through Mardi Gras.
How sweet it is.
Super Bowl XXXIV had the stuff dreams and movies are made of.
 The city devastated by Hurricane Katrnia, the perrenial losing team, the once disgarded quarterback, led by a young head coach with the guts to hold absolutely nothing back.
As Herm Edwards said, “You Play To Win The Game”.
And play to win the game they did.

The Game
The Colts started really strong. They took the Saints a by surprise with an effective running game, where did thay come from? Before the start of the second quarter the Colts were up 10-0. Oh, oh, were we on the verge of an ugly blow out?

Not so fast tweety.
The Saints came right back, kicked a field goal, went for it on 4th down (didn’t make it) but managed to kept Peyton off the field.  From the second quarter on it was all Saints, amazing.
Sean Payton’s agressive playcalling and the different looks Greg Williams’  defense gave Peyton left the 2009 MVP looking a bit dismayed and very frustrated. The Colts young receivers showed their inexperience as the pressure mounted.

My Super Bowl party was rooting for the Saints.
We wondered if the Saints could make adjustments at the half to counter Peyton and keep him off the field. It would be foolhardy to count the Colts and Manning out.

We grabbed some beer, some wine, made our potty runs, warnmed up the Chili and headed back to watch the halftime kickoff.

Half Time
This is when all hell broke loose.
If you were still grabbing  a beer or going potty and didn’t get back at kickoff you missed one of the most amazing scrums ever.
Sean Payton knocked our pants off when he called an onside kick to start the half.
Holy macaroni! The Colts seemed as shocked as were millions of football fans watching the game.
The Colts reacted relatively well to this surprising move, but not well enough.
Th ball slipped out of a Colts player’s hands and the Saints pounced on it.

Then the pileup began, bodies falling and jumping upon bodies. You could see the fighting going on in the pile, it looked as if both benches cleared in the fight for the ball.
 The coaches were on the field pointing that they had the ball. The refs were trying to pull them apart but no sooner did one body get moved that another would fill the gap.
It seemed to go on for 15 minutes. It was great fun, exciting, dramatic and the kind of play that makes NFL football so intoxicating.
We were up screamning and yelling waiting to see who had possession of the ball. When the bodies were untangled and the Saints came up with the ball there had to be a collective roar across America that was heard all the way to New Orleans.
By recovering the ball at this point in the game the Saints gained momentum and confidence. For the Colts it was the beginning of the end.

Many past Super Bowls haven’t lived up to their hype, although there have been a handful of tremendous truly classic games recently.
The NY Giants vs. Patriots, the Steelers vs. Cardinals, the Rams vs. Titans are a few that come to mind.

When you have a true underdog, a team that has never played in a Super Bowl playing for the ultimate prize, the Hollywodd script seems to write itself.
The Saints defied all the odds and rattled, arguably, the most accurate and cerebral quarterback to ever play the game, forcing him to throw a fatal interception to seal the win for the Saints.
It surely doesn’t get much better than that.