The administration at Texas A&M-Commerce probably doesn’t have to worry about its football players making their next extracurricular project stealing books from the library. I’m guessing Morriss, their coach, has never been inside one and wouldn’t be able to tell them where it’s located on campus.

Does this guy realize he works at an institution of higher learning?

What is the allure of high tables and high chairs that I’m missing?

Sincerely,

Dangling Feet in Dodge City (well, Baton Rouge, actually)

Here is the Intimidator at the new Alex Box Stadium, displaying an additional year (2009), representing the sixth national championship for LSU baseball:

How’s your weather?

The fusion of the NFL’s championship trophy with the Carnival atmosphere in the Big Easy in February 2010 seems inspired now, almost fated, as I sit and rest tired feet while younger, more energetic revelers continue to party in the French Quarter. Now we know why the Big Game had to creep from January into February over the years.

Some of the passersby look at me as I type notes on my BlackBerry, and based on their comments, they think I’m texting someone. In a way, I suppose I am. I’m texting you.

In no particular order, except the free-flow way I typed them, here are notes of the sights, sounds and smells of my walk from near the Convention Center down to Jackson Square and deep into the Quarter:

Minutes after the game, euphoria.

There’s never been a feeling like it.

New Orleans empties onto its streets.

Car horns blare.

Strangers high-five strangers.

“Who Dat!”

Tonight, no one is a stranger.

We’re all trying to wrap our minds around it.

“The Saints, NFL champions!”

The streets fill with cheers, and thanks to go-cups, cheers.

There are no words, really, but we’re all trying.

“Boom, chaka laka laka! Boom, chaka laka laka!”

More high fives, swarming like flies.

“Big guy, Who Dat!”

We pass Harrah’s, where a crowd has gathered.

“Who Dat!”

The flow on Poydras seems headed toward the Superdome.

Let’s veer off into the Quarter.

You can see more of the street surface than usual.

That won’t last.

Got time for a celebratory Lucky Dog, Ignatius?

Someone’s walking under huge black and gold balloons.

Music is blaring from car stereos.

Car horns are approximating Mardi Gras songs.

Black-and-gold-umbrella dances.

More high fives.

Right there, smiling children who can’t possibly grasp the moment like their parents can.

Big-drink-in-hand high fives.

Cell-phone-hand high fives.

A single boot on the ground across from Cafe du Monde.

Let’s play kick the boot!

A solitary woman snaps a photo of St. Louis Cathedral.

Your blogger sits and types his notes.

“Who Dat sitting on the phone, texting!” a girl yells.

“He Dat!” her boyfriend chants.

Me Dat, your blogger thinks.

Drew Brees jerseys everywhere.

Reggie Bush jerseys almost everywhere.

A Deuce McAllister jersey catches the eye.

Café au lait, then another, at Café du Monde.

Powdered sugar and jubilation floating in the air.

Around Jackson Square, tarot card readings.

Candles burn, lighting a dark corner.

Nothing beats the smiles of a young stoner couple.

Beads, beads, beads.

A Jeremy Shockey jersey, filled out like I’d never seen, stumbles over to Who Dat and high-five me.

“Halftime (Stand Up & Get Crunk)” fills the cold air.

Improvised percussion. A small parade starts.

Ghetto booties follow.

There are few, if any, street performers out here.

And yet, everyone out here qualifies, in a sense.

Cars roll by as people stand through the sunroofs.

Moonroofs?

What came first, those or Texas Stadium?

Glassy eyes.

Trucks roll by as people stand in the flatbeds.

A jazz band parades past us.

Broken glass.

Handheld cams.

Spills.

Yep, this is what the Quarter smells like.

A lot of black and gold.

A little purple and gold.

Pretty girls.

(Many of them female)

A Saints Tailgating Crew mini-bus.

Cops on horseback.

Shirtless guys standing on the roof of a moving Suburban.

Does everyone out here have style and rhythm? Sure seems that way.

“Let’s repeat!” he says, and then he high-fives your blogger.

A man and his son ride their bikes through the craziness.

A blue hula hoop gets a workout around more black and gold.

“When the Saints” parade breaks out, punctuated by Who Dats.

Group photos. Say “Brees.”

Group photos that from a distance, in the dark, resemble team photos.

A young woman announces she must soon relieve herself.

A split-second later, she Who Dats me, then high-fives me.

Her boyfriend slaps my hand, but it doesn’t feel like a high five.

Cat in the Hat hats in Mardi Gras colors near Pat O’s.

A single glove on the ground at the entrance.

The streets have fewer people on them than you’d think.

Five are make the noise of 10.

Ah, and then I turn onto Bourbon.

Five hundred make the noise of 1,000.

Garbage is fast piling up against the curbs.

Balcony parties.

Lip lock.

A Manning jersey (Saints, No. 8).

No sign of the Manning jersey (Colts, No. 18) from this afternoon.

“Livin’ on a Prayer” sung twice in two blocks.

Bourbon is crowded.

And then some.

The girl pushing against me wants me to back up.

I can’t.

“Get the heck off me,” she says.

Except she doesn’t say “heck.”

She can’t grasp the force pushing me into her.

Or the force pushing her into me.

The Bourbon Street crowd is a little more surly.

This has crowd-surge written all over it.

It’s probably a good time to duck in for beignets and elbow room.

Everyone seems to want to high-five the guy by himself.

There’s joy, disbelief and catharsis everywhere.

And no riots, fires or looting, at least not where I can see.

I’m cold, and it’s a long, long walk to where I left my car.

I hope it’s still there.

I’m glad I came. This was the place to be when the Saints won the Super Bowl.

The Saints won the Super Bowl. Mardi Gras may never end.

Lombardi Gras has a pretty respectable momentum itself.

Time to give the thumbs a rest.

I might need them to hitch a ride if I can’t find my car.

Excuse me, but I have  a few hundred thousand people to celebrate with here in the Big Easy. The Saints just won the Super Bowl. I wonder if any adult beverages will be available in the French Quarter.

After tonight, I mean.

See ya!

I’ve seen it before in teams playing for a city, a state and a region.

LSU’s first home football game after Hurricane Katrina, that Monday night game against Tennessee, was an emotional moment for the Tigers and their fans. The Golden Band from Tigerland played music with a distinct New Orleans theme, and with an uncertain future ahead, the players went out and played, they said, for everyone who needed a lift during dark times.

The Tigers had a couple of early penalties because they were revved up too much. By halftime, many of them had spent all of their energy, the physical kind and the emotional kind. They ran out of gas and blew a 20-0 halftime lead in an overtime loss to the Vols.

I think professional athletes are a bit more disciplined about pacing themselves and conserving their energy, but I think the Saints will still be a bit too high early — especially compared to the Colts, who have a lot of players who are going through the same routine they had three years ago in the Super Bowl in Miami.

Will Smith said he’s going to be careful not to be spent too early, and I don’t doubt his teammates are concerned about it too. My guess is the Saints will struggle a bit in the first quarter, get off the mat in the second, make more adjustments at halftime and pull away in the second half.

It works out well, considering the theme of this year’s team: Finish Strong. The phrase is everywhere, including on the front page of The Times-Picayune as a banner headline today. A Google search will reveal the source of the inspiration Drew Brees has drawn upon and shared with his teammates.

I have no final score to predict, but as I posted this morning, in my dream last night it was Saints 30, Colts 27.

Enjoy!

Driving around Baton Rouge the past couple of weeks, I’ve listened to a little bit of sports talk radio. The same Louisiana-chip-on-the-shoulder mentality I hear every LSU football season — “The national media doesn’t respect us” — surfaced again, this time about the New Orleans Saints. One of the hosts was fanning the flames.

As a Louisiana native, I say: Who cares?

People who are looking for the media to be against them, to be “biased” against their team, will always find exactly what they’re looking for. They’ll make sure they do, and they’ll miss the stories that are “positive” about their team. I heard the same dynamic on the drive to New Orleans today, with WWL talk show hosts egging on their listeners about how the national media isn’t talking about the Saints.

I beg to differ — Michael Irvin’s now-popular diatribe notwithstanding — because there are a lot of media outlets celebrating the Saints and their back story, but that’s not the point. The point? Who cares? Who cares what other people think? This is supposed to be a joyful, fun day.

Let it go. Enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime moment.

Where y’at?? If you’re here, holler and we’ll meet up after the game!

I’ll blog some thoughts on the game and all the hype a bit later. For now, my new Saints logo, which is really an old one:

I woke up today from a dream in which the New Orleans Saints made it to the Super Bowl. They not only made it, but they won 30-27. Ha! Silly stuff, dreams.

The Saints won’t ever play in a Super Bowl. It’s impossible. The football gods won’t allow it. I know this because I’ve been a fan from the start.

John Gilliam’s 94-yard kickoff return for a touchdown against the Los Angeles Rams on the opening kickoff of the first game in Saints history? There are vague memories, if not of watching the moment live, then surely of being indelibly imprinted by the moment and its grotesque false promise.

Wow. This is going to be fun.

When Tom Dempsey kicked his 63-yard field goal at Tulane Stadium to beat the Detroit Lions on the last play of the game, I ran up and down Tulane Street in Lake Charles making sure my neighbors knew.

(Tulane Street? How lucky was that??)

Archie Manning, who was folk hero enough to me in the late 1960s that I rooted for him even when he played the team everyone in my family cheered for, LSU, became the quarterback of the Saints as an NFL rookie. I knew the ‘70s were going to be great.

We were in Erath, at my grandmother’s house, when Archie’s quarterback sneak – barely across the plane of the goal line before the ball was swatted from his grasp – won the season opener against the Los Angeles Rams (there they are again).

It could only get better, right?

Uh, no. Paper bags. The Aints. Regular appearances on “Football Follies” by NFL Films. Losing, losing, losing.

Playoffs? Playoffs?? Hell, we just hoped they’d win a few games.

Yes, I was a Saints fan, but I was a pro football fan too. The season didn’t stop, it couldn’t stop, just because the playoffs had started. I needed a team to pull for, and the Saints weren’t playing. They weren’t an option after the regular season.

For some reason, the Minnesota Vikings became my playoff team. Maybe it was that wicked-cool Viking who roamed the sideline. Maybe it was the ridiculous cold and snow at home games, something a Southern boy could only imagine. It was those things and more, but the Vikings had me once the Saints put their gear in storage for another offseason.

Minnesota beat the Cleveland Browns to go to its first Super Bowl, and I loved every minute of it. My dad later put me on the phone with John Demarie, a Lake Charles native who played for the Browns, and I nervously confessed to him I had pulled for the Vikings against his team.

“Well, they’re a very good team,” Demarie said graciously.

Only a Saints fan would pick the Vikings as his postseason team. They lost 23-7 to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl IV (in Tulane Stadium). My dad’s business associate gave him two tickets to Super Bowl VIII, and we went to Rice Stadium in Houston and saw the Miami Dolphins crush the Vikings 24-7.

Armed with a sign my sister made for me – Fran the Miracle Man – I watched in anguish as the Dolphins kept Fran Tarkenton under wraps on a gloomy, sunless afternoon.

Hours later I came home excited to have a game program, pennant and tickets to prove I’d been there, but crushed by defeat. If I wanted that feeling, I could get that from being a Saints fan. Why in the world would the Vikings do this to me?

As it turns out, my rooting for Minnesota was cursed, doomed. The football gods were punishing me for choosing a playoff team to give my heart to in the absence of any glimmer of hope that my Saints would make it to the postseason and come within sniffing distance of a Super Bowl.

I bought a Minnesota Vikings jersey – the purple version, with the white striping and gold trim – and wanted No. 42 put on it. That was John Gilliam’s number after he left New Orleans and began playing wide receiver for Minnesota.

Someone at the sporting goods store screwed up and put the number on the jersey in gold, rather than the regulation white, ruining the jersey for me. I was cursed, and I didn’t fully realize it yet.

The Vikings lost 16-6 to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl IV at Tulane Stadium. Two years later they lost 32-14 to the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XI at the Rose Bowl.

It was 1977. It was time to give up on the Vikings and put all of my allegiance on the Saints. They rewarded me three years later by losing 14 consecutive games to start the 1980 season, prompting Buddy Diliberto to put the bag over his head.

It took a strike to help put the Saints in the playoffs for the first time, in 1987, and who was their first-round opponent? The Vikings. Final score: Minnesota 44, New Orleans 10.

I got married, got busy with work and paid less and less attention to the Saints. They made it to the playoffs again, and with my wife a convert and cheering for them all-in with my mom, they teased us all again and lost – in 1990, in 1991 and in 1992.

(Wife became ex-wife, but I swear it’s unrelated. At least I think so.)

When they finally won a playoff game, in 2000, I was busy covering LSU basketball and unable to watch. When they won another one, in 2006, I was sent to Chicago to supplement the paper’s coverage, and at Soldier Field, with snow falling and the temperature dropping, I knew. These were the Bears, of the Black and Blue Division that featured the Vikings of my childhood, and those teams were in their element in an open-air stadium against a team not accustomed to playing in such conditions.

That’s not why the Saints lost, of course, but every snowflake reminded me of the curse that began when the Vikings stole my attention for all those postseasons of long ago.

The Saints remembered how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again and again after that, and I discovered a new helmet in their honor. I posted it here, more than once.

And then came that dream I had last night. The Saints made it to the Super Bowl, winning the NFC Championship Game and advancing by defeating – yes, you already know it – the Minnesota Vikings.

Ha! That’s a good one. I’m not falling for that one. The Saints will never make it to the Super Bowl.

I don’t know how so many people could know about my dream and be in on the joke, but they went to extraordinary effort to fake this Jim Henderson call.

Pigs would definitely fly. Hell would obviously freeze over. The Saints in the Super Bowl? No way.