Ellington

No one with the fortitude to support the New Orleans Saints for any appreciable amount of time is a stranger to sitting through the NFL's Wild Card Weekend with unspecific, non-wager-based rooting interest. In that sense, last weekend was typical of the first football weekend of any new year: plenty of postseason action, none of it wearing black and gold.

But the familiarity for Saints fans ends there. What fans usually experience as two days pondering what went wrong and what could have been for New Orleans was instead a weekend of giddy impatience. In place of envy for teams beginning the month-long stretch toward hallowed Super Bowl ground, fans enjoyed a sort of pity bordering on condescension—let the peons beat on one another in the freezing northern rain and muck. In pro football's closely matched battle of attrition, skipping directly to the second of the four rounds required to win a championship offers its share of pleasures and advantages.

For teams that have never enjoyed the privilege, though—like the Saints—the wait causes a little unease, too. For all but a few rarefied clubs, long-term goal-setting most seasons realistically stops at merely "making the playoffs." But where do your interests lie when your team not only gets into the postseason, but in the process secures one of the two first-round byes afforded to division champions in each conference with the best overall records? Certainly, New Orleans fans have no idea. Without question, the break is positive, a chance to rest and heal after 10 unrelenting games and, most importantly, to advance with no chance of elimination; virtually all prospective Super Bowl participants have had the first week off. But this is the Saints, hardly the typical front-runner, especially at 10-6 and with just three wins over fellow playoff squads. What about momentum? Rust? This was weird.

New Year's Eve, Week 17, brought the final day of the regular season. New Orleans, having already secured its first ever NFC south title and the first-round bye, hosted preseason favorite Carolina, which was eliminated from the playoff hunt by the New York Giants' win the night before. Saints fans know better than anyone what a "meaningless" finale is all about, but they are unaccustomed to being the winners going into such a game. With nothing on the line, with no way to improve on playoff positioning, how urgent was a Saints win? Should the starters play and risk injury?

Coach Sean Payton sat former Ole Miss star Deuce McAllister and Itawamba Community College product Joe Horn while playing Drew Brees—as a highly competent quarterback who finished second to his old San Diego teammate LaDainian Tomlinson in the league's MVP voting last week, another new experience for Saints fans decades removed from Archie Manning's futile heroics with awful teams—and rookie sensation Reggie Bush for a single series. That was an impressive, crisp opening touchdown drive. But with scrubs soon getting run over by Panther starters en route to a two-touchdown defeat, the Dome was hardly rocking the Saints into their highest-ever playoff seed. Did the loss detract from the team's sensitive confidence, their "killer instinct"? Sitting the starters meant that they would effectively have two games off between snaps, three weeks on the calendar of nothing but practice. Is that too long? Have the Patriots ever worried about this?

For Saints fans, it's all new. New Orleans is two games from the Super Bowl, a position the franchise has reached only once, in 2000, when an injury-plagued collection of underdogs outlasted high-powered St. Louis in the wild card round and was inevitably rocked a week later by well-rested Minnesota. That team, though, was running on fumes for more than a month, relying on an untested backup quarterback and no-name playmakers everywhere. The Saints then posed no legitimate threat of winning the three games required against top competition to slip into the ultimate championship; the St. Louis win was a milestone of fortitude and nothing else was required or expected.

By contrast, the 2006 Saints somehow look exponentially closer to the real thing, similar to that 2000 team in that it finished as a 10-6 division champion under a new, first-time head coach who won the league's Coach of the Year honor by revamping the entire team following a 3-13 campaign, acquired a veteran quarterback in free agency and features a young, Heisman Trophy-winning running back still feeling his way into pro stardom. Much of that is due to their success against the rest of a very mediocre conference, and of the subsequent wildcard bye. Most of all, it's the result of Brees' birthmarked brilliance.

Unprecedented expectations from an entire region will ride on Saturday night's game against the Eagles, further into January than the Superdome has ever been open for football except the Big Game itself. It's about time.