The New Orleans Saints are going to the Super Bowl. ... And now anything is possible.
Dogs will fly.
Hell will freeze over.
Wait a minute, Robinson, didn't you write this column last year?! Yes, I did — when the Arizona Cardinals were headed to the Super Bowl.
What is going on? First, the Cardinals, now the Saints? Who knew the Super Bowl was a segment for World's Biggest Losers? Who's next, the Detroit Lions?
OK, Robinson, let's not get carried away. If you can't count on the Saints to lose, what can you count on? Anything can happen now.
If the Saints can get to the Super Bowl, then Barry Bonds can tell the truth and nothing but the truth, David Caruso can learn to act, Tiger can win her back, Dick Cheney can become a comedian, Pres. Obama can lose the teleprompter.
Brett Favre can retire, Congress can give itself a pay cut and pay off the deficit, Terrell Owens can make nice with his former quarterbacks, the Chicago Cubs can win the World Series.
The Saints weren't supposed to get this far, and it wouldn't have if the football gods hadn't intervened and dropped five turnovers into their laps in the conference championship game and ruined a perfectly good Brett Favre story.
These Saints have done what Archie Manning, Bobby Hebert, Earl Campbell, George Rodgers, Mike Ditka, Paul Hornung and the rest of them couldn't do: Put the downtrodden franchise in the world championship game and end a history of futility.
Know who was the first to wear bags over their heads during games as a sign of their embarrassment? Saints fans. After watching the Saints lose their first 14 games in 1980, local sportscaster "Buddy D" Diliberto advised Saints supporters to wear the paper bags over their heads at the team's home games. After that, it became a custom in American sports for the fans of losing teams to wear bags over their heads.
Saints fans endured, but a sense of humor helped. They called their team the "Aints."
Even the team's birth was a shaky proposition, something that sounds as if it were arranged in a dark, smoke-filled back room off the French Quarter. The NFL needed U.S. Senate approval to merge with the AFL. Hale Boggs, the Senate Majority Whip from Louisiana, struck a deal: He would support the merger if the NFL gave New Orleans a franchise.
The rest is un-history, as they say.
The Saints were built with has-beens and castaways from other teams for their inaugural season, 1967, which was also the year the Super Bowl debuted. The first team was called "Mecom's Misfits," named after their 27-year-old owner John Mecom. Playing for the Saints wasn't an opportunity; it was a sentence. They tried to launch a hot-air balloon during pregame festivities, but it had a hole in it and never got off the ground. It was supposed to symbolize the rise of the new franchise — instead it symbolized a team that never got off the ground.
In 43 years, the Saints have managed nine winning seasons — five of them coming during one magical six-year window in the late '80s and early '90s. By comparison, during that same era, the Cardinals and Lions managed 10 and 11 winning seasons, respectively.
The Saints have had only four winning seasons in the last 17 years.
It took 20 years before they had their first winning season; 34 years for their first playoff win.
Among teams that have existed for more than 10 years, only the Falcons (.410) and Buccaneers (.391) have worse winning percentages than the Saints (.418). Both those teams have been to the Super Bowl. After losing their first 26 games, the Bucs claimed the first win in their team history against none other than the Saints. The Saints' alltime regular-season record: 275-378-5.
The team's highlight film would be about as long as a beer commercial. It would go something like this: The Saints were created in 1967, they drafted Archie Manning in 1971, blah, blah, blah, Earl Campbell, blah, blah, blah, Jim Haslett, Bobby Hebert, blah, blah, blah, Tom Demsey's foot, blah, blah, blah, and in 2010 they went to the Super Bowl.
The best part of a Saints game for many years was halftime. Danny Abramowicz, a former Saints receiver, told The Associated Press. "They were like Super Bowl spectaculars. Bands and balloons and ostrich races, everything. ... We hated to go to the locker room because we'd miss them."
The Saints probably didn't help their luck any when they stumbled upon human bones while digging the foundation for the Superdome in 1971 — they were building a stadium over an old cemetery filled with victims from a yellow fever epidemic of a century earlier. Hurricanes, poor draft choices, hard-partying players and plenty of losses later, the Saints are finally in the Super Bowl.
Diliberto, the radio man, once promised to walk down Bourbon Street wearing a dress if the Saints made it to the Super Bowl. Alas, he died five years ago.
e-mail: drob@desnews.com