importance of a silly football game

Superbowl XLIV just ended and the Saints won an incredible game by making all the big plays down the stretch. Now I know to many the Superbowl is just a football game, a spectacle of American sport, to be leisurely consumed. And I know to many more of you football is in your blood and that you symbolically live and die with your favorite team's successes and failures, and if you're a Saints fan you're living well tonight!

But the victory achieved by the New Orleans Saints tonight is substantively more significant than that. New Orleans' victory is an important moment in contemporary American history. After Hurricane Katrina struck the city late in the summer of 2005 it seemed inevitable that New Orleans would take a likeness to the alternate 1985 Hill Valley that Marty McFly and Doc Brown return to in Back to the Future: Part II. But when the Saints returned to the Superdome in 2006 they breathed life back into the city, and tonight they made a loud and proud announcement that their city is back, thriving, and better than ever.