Bob Ford: For New Orleans, Super Bowl remains just a game

If you access the powerful Nexis search engine, the standard for information collected from most major publications in North America, and keyword "New Orleans Saints" and "Katrina" and "long-suffering," the result is a list of 51 recent articles each pimping the idea that civic renewal can be accomplished within the space of a professional football game.

That was just yesterday. Certainly, there will be more instances by this morning.

It is a familiar, if threadbare, concept, and that same basic idea - including the same adjectival description of local sports fans - has also been applied to economically ravaged Detroit, which was going to be saved by a Michigan State win in the Final Four, and to New York, which was to have its shattered resolve somehow mended by the New York Yankees in the 2001 World Series.

As if.

Mere entertainment is a lot to ask from a sporting event, as anyone who watched Sunday's NFL Pro Bowl can attest. Looking for something more is the mission of fools and seekers of the neat angle.

So let this season's Super Bowl be just a football game. People in Indianapolis and New Orleans are excited, the rest of us are moderately interested but, when the sun rises Monday morning, nothing much will have changed in the world, New Orleans included.

Michigan State was unable to save Detroit - which would have been a nice feat for a school with a campus 90 miles away - and the Yankees were unable to shake New York from its post-9/11 shock. (God knows there were some interesting attempts, though, as when a New York Post writer suggested the Arizona Diamondbacks should be prevented from visiting Ground Zero because "It's ours.")

Good, easy angles for the stories, however, and the notion that the New Orleans Saints will bring closure to that city's recovery from Hurricane Katrina is stitched from the same cloth.

New Orleans wasn't exactly Monaco before the hurricane hit in 2005. It has always been corrupt, crime-ridden, and populated by great swaths of the desperately poor. That was true prior to Katrina, it is still true now and it will be true next week even if the Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday.

Yes, yes, but what about the "long-suffering" fans? It is accurate that the Saints, who came into existence as an expansion franchise in 1967, have never been league champions in that space of time.