Saints bring New Orleans Super Bowl glory

NEW ORLEANS, USA (AFP) -- A city nearly destroyed by a hurricane five years ago exploded with joy as the New Orleans Saints upset the Indianapolis Colts, 31-17 to win their first Super Bowl.

Happy hangovers awaited the ecstatic fans who poured into the streets of the French Quarter late Sunday to celebrated the win by their beloved Saints in true cajun style.

A city famous for its diversions -- Mardi Gras parades, Jazz music and colourful politics, to name a few -- set aside all distractions to focus on the big game.

Even the strippers on bawdy Bourbon Street stopped dancing. Instead, they joined thousands of revellers cheering the Saints at nearby bars.

White fireworks burst in the distance. Strangers hugged, whooped and hollered in the streets, waving flags, shaking cowbells and dancing to spontaneous brass bands.

College students embraced restaurant waiters. A homeless man toasted beers with well-dressed tourists. Camera flashbulbs popped. Motorists honked horns with a cheerful cadence usually reserved only for the Mardi Gras Carnival.

Stunned by the team's fourth-quarter thrashing of the Colts and aided by hours of drink consumption, Saints fans in the French Quarter seemed speechless, but happily so.

The only intelligible sound from the celebratory crowds were repeated choruses of the cajun chant "Who Dat!"

The Saints' winning run, after 43 long years of waiting, has been a powerful tonic for residents still recovering from the killer August 26, 2005 storm that flooded nearly 80 per cent of the low-lying coastal city.

Hundreds of people died in their homes after the levees broke and water levels rose the rooftops. Even more died in the chaos that followed -- including some of those stranded in the Superdome football stadium that served as a shelter.

Locals, who had angrily brooded over the sluggish pace of recovery, have for months now greeted each other on the street with the joyously ungrammatical Saints' fan chant, "Who dat? Who dat! Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?"

Super Bowl fever swamped the Big Easy, where everything from Mardi Gras parades to church services and jury trials was rescheduled to make sure fans could catch the kick-off in Miami.

"This is the pinnacle of my life -- now I can die!" said Randy Sumrall, 46, who never moved back home after fleeing Katrina, but came back to New Orleans to watch the big game with his girlfriend and old neighbours.

"I knew they were going to win," he told AFP. And he said there is nowhere better to watch it happen than the Big Easy.

After a pass by Colts quarterback fluttered harmlessly to the ground in the final seconds, the familiar "Who dat" chant erupted in the Alpine restaurant near Jackson Square.

As the first quarter started, fans bedecked in the Saints' black and gold colours, had cheered from stands set up to watch the game on televisions mounted outside a bar across from the French Quarter.

Some fans wore beads, caught at a passing parade, earlier in the day.

Outside the Chart Room, a gritty French Quarter bar, a man costumed as a black-and-gold warrior from the Star Trek movie series, pointed to a "78" on his armored chest - the number of his favourite Saint, tackle John Stinchcomb.

"This is what New Orleans deserves," said the warrior, Larry Jehle Junior, a patient transporter for a local hospital. "We have all been through so much in the last five years."

Four generations of one family gathered for a Super Bowl party in the Bucktown neighbouwrhood a short walk from the 17th Street Canal which burst during Katrina.

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