One needn’t look far to find a love letter to New Orleans. Perhaps you are a fan of the House of the Rising Sun, maybe you were intrigued by the Confederacy of Dunces. Listen to the music of the Rebirth Brass Band or spend a night at Tipitinas & you’ll hear musical notes waxing rhapsodic about New Orleans, Louisiana. I’m convinced Louis Armstrong’s trumpet was created to tell the world just how happening The City that Care Forgot was.

By all accounts it needn’t be what it is. Dirty, sweaty, buzzing with bugs, crawling with critters of the worst type, with the incessant liquid oozing up from the bayou or down from the sky – it doesn’t seem like a place to capture the hearts of millions. The French Quarter often carries the smell of the “Booticky” as we called it in college- a little beer, some booze, some vomit, mixed in with some horse poop it creates noxious fumes that let you know you’ve arrived.

But. Just but. It is New Orleans…and you either see it as described above or you see what I see. You see beads dangling from wrought iron balconies with carefully tended plants curling up the sides of crumbly brick buildings. You see parents painting their kids Mardi Gras ladders in shocking shades of purple and green and getting up at 5am to stake them out a good spot for the parades. You smell the bread and olives at Central Grocery and you know just a ways away is a po’boy to die for at the shack called Parasols. It is a town of heart and courage, flourishing in a place it shouldn’t, with traditions melded together from the dirt poor to the aristocracy, from the Caribbean and France, from Spain and from Haiti. It is a town that not only feeds your belly – and if you let it, it will fill it up ten fold with the gold from the sea and some cold beer to wash it all down- but it feeds your soul. Just as the oysters at Casamentos quiet your hunger, the pulse of the city can quiet your nerves, and all you need to do to feel its effects are to close your eyes and take a deep breath – beneath the booticky & the dampness you’ll catch the oak trees and magnolias and the buzz that will tickle your nose until you are convinced you just took a swig of the finest French champagne.

After Hurricane Katrina- the damn storm that New Orleans can’t forget, even if the nation and its broadcasters would let her- some argued that New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt. Others wondered just what those crazy folks were doing down there, surrounded by a gulf and a river and a lake.  But those who get New Orleans just resigned themselves to hard work & sweat to bring it all back. After all, the midnight rumble of the streetcar wouldn’t be as melodic if it wasn’t accompanied by the buzz of a mosquito, the murmur of “ya’lls” from the porch of the The Columns Hotel and the slowly dissipating Southern heat.

Last night the New Orleans Saints, the team formerly known as the ‘Aints, got their first trip to the Superbowl. It might seem trivial, perhaps you were cheering for Farve & his legacy (whatever that might be), but for those of us with NOLA imprinted on our soul- be it from birth, from college, from a weekend trip or a rescue mission – those of with that black and gold fleur de lis indelibly inked into our being – this Superbowl trip is a signal of the great things to continue to come out of New Orleans.

You see, New Orleans is a city that believes. And I think I join everyone in the Who Dat nation when I simply say that I believe. In our team, in our footprint and in our prosperity.

Bless those boys.