So it’s Mardi Gras in late September tonight in New Orleans as the Saints were triumphant in their return home to the city and to the Louisiana Superdome thirteen months after 1.3 million were evacuated from the Crescent City and about 20,000 of the city’s most desperate used the Superdome as a “shelter of last resort” from Hurricane Katrina and the water flooding over the broken levees around Lake Ponchartrain.

As the news has it covered from every possible angle, I just have a additional observations:

Cool pregame entertainment with Green Day and U2 playing their hits, singing some N’awlins standards, Bono rewriting lyrics to “Beautiful Day,” and having New Orleans brass play behind them. My one question: couldn’t they have found one band actually from the state of Louisiana to play in the pregame festivities? Sure New Orleans is famous for its jazz and maybe the jazz combo of Harry Connick Jr. and Branford and Wynton Marsalis (9th Ward, baybee!) wouldn’t be rollicking enough to amp up the crowd but what about Tim McGraw? Better than Ezra? Britney Spears? Come on now, is ESPN telling me that they couldn’t get Hank Williams Jr., of Shreveport, LA, to do the “My Rowdy Friends on Monday Night” song live at the Superdome?

Is the elder Bush trying to make for the missteps of his son by showing up at the Superdome and doing the coin toss? I’m not saying it’s in bad taste but maybe the city of New Orleans has just about had it with white guys named Bush. Though to be fair, former president George Herbert Walker Bush has been raising a lot of money with Bill Clinton for New Orleans. Maybe I’m cynical here but no matter how much money the elder Bush raises or how many ceremonial coin tosses he attends, there’s nothing that’s going to make up for those five days when GWB Jr. and the rest of the administration sat on their hands last year before getting their asses handed to them by the media.

Spike Lee wouldn’t take Kornheiser’s bait to lambaste the Administration for their delayed response. Though he has been outspoken about the Bush response and made the 4.5 hour documentary When the Levees Broke, he refused to in his words, pull “a Kanye West.” He did throw a few well placed jabs saying that he couldn’t believe it took Bush and Co. so long to come help American citizens.

Though the Saints won, it bears saying that Reggie Bush, the Bush that the city has rallied around, did very little to contribute to the win. He has, in fact, not done a whole lot to contribute to any of the three New Orleans wins. Yes, this is filed from the department of “could it, in the grand scheme of things, be ‘ironic’?”

The spirit of a city - the character of a place - is defined by the few things that galvanize large segments of the community that are experienced together. Hardships and heartbreaks, triumphs and happiness, all of which were lived through over the last 13 months and finally seen tonight - collectively felt and released - in the microcosm of a game. This is the uplifting spirit sport. This is why when the city wakes up tomorrow and has to go back to the harsh realities of putting their lives back together and rebuilding, they had something to cheer for on Monday night and being undefeated, at 3-0, the city will have something to cheer for again on Sunday. New Orleans may be the city that care forgot, but not their football team or the NFL.

And lastly, I wanted to have something about the cutaway to the wait staff at Emeril’s New Orleans watching the game, something about how food is so much a part of the character and spirit of a city and how cool I thought that was since after Mardi Gras what is New Orleans known for but its magnificent food, but I sort of got swept away in the ideas above. For what it’s worth, if I didn’t have to go into work today, I planned on staying home to spend the day making a slow, simmering, smokey gumbo which would have been ready for kick off.

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