Due to Hurricane Katrina, many people will think back ten years ago when they saw a New Orleans Saints flag, the local football franchise that put in such an emotional performance during their first game after the disaster. Indeed, at the time, even non-fans were rooting for the team, simply in order to express their sympathies for the city and its residents.

It’s interesting to think about how sports teams become so identified with their host cities so that waving a New Orleans Saints flag is preferable to, say, waving the official city flag – which would likely not really even be recognized as an act of solidarity by the majority of people. How is it possible that multi-millionaire athletes, most of whom are not even from the city, end up becoming its most galvanizing symbols of resilience and redemption?

That there are few goodwill ambassadors stronger than a city’s sports teams is probably because that so much of its population are actually sports fans. And what is a sports fan but someone to whom ritual and symbol is highly important?

Indeed, the Katrina catastrophe was in itself hugely symbolic, within hours easily lending itself to all manner of cultural and, of course, political pronouncement. Under such conditions, it happens to be quite logical for people to turn to something like the New Orleans Saints flag as a symbol that transcends all others, one that unifies – for who can be against the city’s own team winning a really symbolic game?

It absolutely was among the worst single event to ever hit the Crescent City, and the United States as a whole, with some eighty percent of its parishes flooded and hundreds of thousands evacuated – just for starters. So for one magical moment in time, with the Superdome itself scarcely just repaired, to win was to cleanse, to reconnect, to redeem.

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