The Saints

I’ve lived with Phil for a long time and the Saints have dominated our dominated Sunday afternoons. Phil doesn't take a lot of alone time, but Saints Sundays are sacred. He has been a fan in exile. There aren’t a lot of Saints fans in London. Or Boston. But Phil usually managed to find a way every Sunday to watch the Saints fail again in the ways that only they can fail. The Saints never just lose a game. They always give you hope that they just might be able to pull it together and then they screw it all up.

A strange thing happened on Sunday. It wasn’t that they won. That's not strange. The win was just a good sign of things to come. The strange thing was that everywhere I went people were talking about the Saints. At church they announced that the Saints games would be projected on the wall of the doublewide trailer we're meeting in. At the bar where Phil watched the game he wasn’t relegated to some random side room where no one else cared to watch the bigger games—the whole bar was cheering with him. And at the birthday party I went to with the kids the parents were wondering about and checking in on the game. This feels strange. It is strange that this whole city cares about a game that in my former lives only Phil cared about.

Chris, we beat you.

Guy, could the Saints be the next Patriots? This city really needs that.