I never addressed the Super Bowl, though I got many emails hammering me for lack of coverage (no I didn't). Something had been bothering me for some time leading up to the game, but I bit my tongue. Then, Jim Gray grabbed a mic for Westwood One:

“Finally something good has happened to the city of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana. A team that’s first 20 seasons didn’t have a winning record.  It led to boos and bags over the fans heads. The Ain’ts, they ain’t no more. Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city, the winds so strong, the water too deep. Like many of the city’s residents the team itself was homeless. Bouncing from Baton Rouge to San Antonio, the team barely held together, but didn’t move permanently and began to rebuild. Funny how a city that was ravaged by wind, is now saluting a Brees.

When Drew Brees arrived four seasons ago, it was beginning of the end of the suffering for both the city and the franchise. He said he felt it was his calling, his destiny to come to the Saints at their worst time. Now they are calling him Breesus; the city renamed Drew Orleans.

The Mannings were the first family of the Saints, the first family of the city of New Orleans. Now they get the prize they so long wanted, by Archie and his boys, a Super Bowl Championship for the Saints, only it comes in a fashion they would have preferred to avoid." (Audio here from 670 The Score, on the fifth tag)

Instead of focusing on whether or not the years of ineptitude Saints fans suffered was enough of a story, as in, "Holy sh*t, the SAINTS won the Super Bowl!?," Gray decided to give his monologue a different touch, even if it meant tweeking the facts a tad.

Gray starts off well enough, bringing us back to bag covered faces and a team dubbed the "Ain'ts". Then just as quickly as he hooked me, with his oh-so-poetic voice, I was lost. I personally don't find anything funny, nor ironic, about the quarterback's last name and the natural disaster that belted the city some four plus years ago. Not to mention the fact that the city of New Orleans, from all accounts, withstood the wind from Hurrican Katrina relatively well, rendering this little play on words useless.

Bothered more was I about the fact that Drew Brees (not Breeze) was being dubbed the savior of the city (and the franchise). Is this fair to Drew? Is it true that since Brees' arrival that the city of New Orleans is all better now? I know there have been major strides made, but from all that I read, there are even bigger steps ahead. New Orleans still remains as unoccupied as Detroit, and was the murder capital of the United States in 2009. The state is 2nd poorest in our nation (Source CNNMoney). Heck there were three shootings during the celebration.

But the end is in sight believes Gray.

I understand it's easy to get caught up in things like this, and to want to believe that these games are bigger than they are. But the same way we shouldn't ask out athletes to be our children's role models, we shouldn't expect our sports franchises to do more than win games.

In the same way it is so easy to aggrandize something of this nature, it is easy to dismiss it. I sincerely hope that this victory provides the people who have and are still suffering some distraction from their day to day lives, and I hope I'm wrong, maybe this is something bigger than what I think it is.

Maybe, as Bob Marshall from NOLA writes, this is "the exception to the rule." Maybe, "this team and these fans have bonded into one family, in a way you normally only see on a college campus or a high school gym." Maybe there is a difference between this situation and others that have come before it.