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Tom Benson, the team’s eighty-two-year-old owner, was the first to reach historic Gallier Hall, where the local politicians were waiting with elaborate champagne toasts. “Hail, Saints! Hail, Saints! Drink up!” Mayor Ray Nagin called out.

“This win is for the people of New Orleans and Louisiana,” Mr. Benson said.

A grinning Drew Brees, our phenomenal quarterback and the Super Bowl MVP, rolled through the streets surrounded, as he often is, by his offensive line. Their float had a giant head of Bacchus, the Roman god of drinking and wine. Drew was tossing so many minifootballs, some people in the crowd grew alarmed: Was he putting his carefully repaired shoulder at risk? But Drew was feeling no pain. On this night, the deadly accurate passer, who’d hit a record thirty-two of his thirty-nine Super Bowl attempts, was aiming—oh, just anywhere.

“How’s the Who Dat Nation feel tonight?” he called out to the screaming crowd, his question greeted with a giant roar. “New Orleans, we love you, baby!”

I rode with my assistant coaches on a “Smoky Mary” superfloat borrowed from the Krewe of Orpheus. Joe Vitt and Gregg Williams and Pete Carmichael and Big Dan Dalrymple and the others. I wanted all of them there. My wife, Beth, rode too. So did our children, Meghan and Connor. I believe in making these things a family affair. After what my family had been through with me, they deserved this ride at least as much as I did.

But the star of our float was the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I’d had the trophy with me since Sunday night in Miami when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell handed it to Mr. Benson and he handed it to me. The trophy is a regulation-size, sterling-silver Tiffany football in the kicking position. It is the most prestigious prize we have in our game—something most New Orleans Saints fans had never expected to see up close. I’d gotten some grief in the media for admitting I’d slept with the trophy the night we won. More like I’d passed out next to it. I’d even joked that I might have drooled on Vince. You know what? Maybe I did. But now, here I was, standing in front of this roaring crowd, holding this seven-pound piece of hardware over my head, hugging it, kissing it, waving it and shaking it for the crowd, pumping the trophy in the air. People understood immediately what it meant. It was an amazing symbol of triumph over adversity, a reminder of how far this team and this city had come. I wanted everyone to get a piece of that silver football.

When people saw the trophy, it was like they were viewing the Holy Grail. At one point, I got off the float—this was silly of me. But I got off the float because I wanted to get down to the street level and let some people touch it. Just touch it.

As I moved toward the crowd, people were leaning forward and reaching and squealing. In a few seconds, it was like an ant colony, with people just wanting to feel the trophy to know that it was real. For a moment, I disappeared beneath that hill of humanity. Nobody was pushing. Nobody was violent. But I could see the police moving toward me. They looked a little concerned. They opened up a path and hustled me and the trophy back up to the float.

Whew!

By the time our float reached Gallier Hall, things had gotten so loose, the U.S. Marine Corps Band and the Ying Yang Twins were trying to outdo one another with competing versions of “Stand Up & Get Crunk,” the Saints’ unofficial Southern-rap anthem. I was seven Bud Lights in. It was my turn to greet the mayor. My wife squeezed my wrist and said, “Control yourself, honey.”

In his toast, Mayor Nagin praised the “gazumbas” I’d shown by calling that ambush onside kick to start the second half.
Gazumbas?
Only in New Orleans does a mayor compliment a football coach quite so vividly.

I just smiled.

“We wish all of you could spend one night with this trophy,” I said to the crowd. “Your support means so much to us. We thank you, and we’ll see you again this time next year.”

As the parade rolled on, it was hard to take all of it in. I wanted to embrace this unique moment, to feel it, to inhale it, to record every detail. The noise. The camera flashes. The outstretched hands. The love. Especially the love. I didn’t want any of it to end, as a mad jumble of memories rushed furiously around my head.

Playing football in high school and college and dreaming of the pros. Learning that coach—not quarterback—was my best position. Saying “yes” to Bill Parcells, “no” to Al Davis and “oh, well” to Green Bay. Getting my head around the whole idea of New Orleans, then trying to think of an answer when my wife asked me: “Are we really moving this family into a disaster zone?”

Taking over a team the media gave no chance to, whose stadium was an international symbol of misery and might never reopen anyway. Picking schools for the children, finding a quarterback for the team and letting a Heisman-winning running back fall in our laps. Getting into the Dome and packing the place with the loudest and most grateful fans on earth. People who couldn’t imagine staying in Houston or Atlanta or some other sensible place.

The buildings in downtown New Orleans are very close to the street, and many of them have second-floor balconies. So even up on a float, you can look directly into the eyes of the people. It’s all more intense and personal here. The parade was like four hours of third down and five.

As we snaked through downtown, the adrenaline never let up. These were the people who’d been counting on us to bring a team and a city back to life. I think we both felt some relief.

And what was I doing here? Me. Someone who’d never been a head coach before. Anywhere. Leading a team that usually brought up the rear. A Midwestern kid, a decent college player who’d had a few cups of coffee in the pros but never really gotten a foothold there. A coach with strong feelings, looking for the right place to land. A guy who didn’t get his dream job, showing up in a city whose survival was a genuine question mark, and discovering he belongs there.

As I rode in the parade that night, laughing and shouting and waving that trophy around, I knew right then I had to tell this story. I had to tell it as well as I could.

How a city and a team actually rescued each other. How neither one of them could have done it alone.

I COME FROM NAPERVILLE,
Illinois, an old farming community that became a prosperous outer suburb of Chicago. The area is known for its high-tech office parks, its educated work-force and its excellent public schools. It is tidy and overwhelmingly white. Naperville has a river, the DuPage. It isn’t quite the Mississippi.

Both my parents grew up around Scranton, Pennsylvania, anthracite coal country, although I was actually born in San Mateo, California. I was the third of four children with two sisters and a brother. My dad worked in insurance. He moved the family a couple of times. But Naperville is where I went to junior high and high school. It’s where I learned to love the game of football.

I went out for the team at Naperville Central High. Go, Redskins—excuse me, Redhawks! No one would call me an instant standout. I mostly sat on the bench until senior year. But I knew every diagram in the playbook, and I loved to analyze game films when I went home at night. Our coach, J. R. Bishop, liked my intensity. My senior year, he made me his starting quarterback. Coach Bishop had a brilliant football mind, especially for the passing offense. For years he ran passing clinics for high school players around the Midwest. To this day, Coach Bishop comes to our training camp every August to be a part of our team. Outside of my parents, he was definitely my biggest influence growing up. He told me I had the talent and the smarts to be a successful quarterback, and he said it with such conviction, I couldn’t help but believe him. He trusted me enough to let me call my own plays when we were way ahead late in a game. That’s rare in high school. The Redskins were quite a force in the DuPage Valley Conference in the fall of 1981. Our team made it to the play-offs that year. I made enough of an impression that I won a football scholarship to Eastern Illinois University.

I was a better player in college than I was in high school, especially if it had to do with throwing the football. People at Eastern Illinois tell me I had the third-highest passing yardage in NCAA Division 1-AA history: 10,665. I know my seventy-five touchdowns were a school record until Tony Romo sailed past me in 2002. We went 11-2 my senior year.

I loved the whole dynamic of a football offense, predicting where my open receivers would be, scrambling when I had to, counting on the protection of a sturdy offensive line. The quarterback has to account for a large number of variables, working under pressure and making decisions on the fly. Football taught me the thrill of that. But most of all, football gave me confidence and it gave me a goal. After college, I didn’t feel done yet. I wanted to make a run at the pros. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Six-foot, 200-pound quarterbacks from Eastern Illinois are not the biggest pro-scout magnet. But I wasn’t finished chasing that dream. I knew the odds were against me. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. And if, for whatever reason, it didn’t work out, I figured I could always do what J. R. Bishop had done: I could be a football coach.

I was a good quarterback. But the truth is, I wasn’t good enough to play professionally. Not for a living. At least I was smart enough to figure that out relatively soon. Relatively. The 1987 draft came. I didn’t get drafted. I had a one-day tryout with the Kansas City Chiefs. Their quarterback was hurt in a car wreck. I got fifty dollars for the day and a night in the local Adam’s Mark. That was my Chiefs career. Someone came up with the idea of playing football indoors. That spring, I tried out for the Chicago Bruisers, one of the original four clubs of the Arena Football League. I made the team and played in a grand total of four games. There was a mixed crew in the league: some ex-NFL players, some first-year guys just out of college like me. After Week Three of the season, we were flying to Pittsburgh to play the Gladiators, when I got a call from Wayne Giordano, general manager of the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League. He wanted me to play for them. This was a step in the right direction—from the small time to the not-quite-as-small time. In one short phone conversation, the Canadian GM and Jim Foster, the Arena owner, made a deal for my football rights: I’d play Friday night’s game in Pittsburgh. Then I’d fly to Ottawa. The Rough Riders would pay the Bruisers one thousand dollars to release me. In leagues like these, this is what passes for a big-money deal. For the record, I was the first player ever traded or sold in the Arena Football League.

In my month and a half in Ottawa, I didn’t get any playing time. They used me on the practice squad. The coach, Fred Glick, called me into his office one day and said matter-of-factly: “We’re moving on.” I went back home to Naperville. I painted condos with my buddies and started looking for my next football job. That fall, the NFL players went on strike, and I thought that might be an opportunity. It was, briefly. I caught on as a replacement quarterback with the Chicago Bears—“the Spare Bears,” they called us. All the fans wanted to know was, “When are the real Bears coming back?” In three games, I completed eight of twenty-three passes for seventy-nine yards, no touchdowns and one interception. I was sacked seven times for minus forty-seven yards. Numbers like those didn’t give the real Bears too much incentive to keep me around when the players’ strike ended after twenty-four days. I was clearly running low on options. But I still had one last Hail Mary career move. By the way, that one interception came at the hands of the replacement New Orleans Saints.

You know that John Grisham book
Playing for Pizza
? It’s about a quarterback who can’t get work in the NFL, so he signs on with a semipro team in Italy. Change a few details, and that was me. Only I went to England instead of Italy. My team was the Leicester Panthers of the UK Budweiser National League. I liked the idea of a beer-sponsored football league, and the Panthers seemed happy to have me. The deal worked like this: They recruited four Americans as player-coaches on what was really one step up from a club team. We got free beer and spending money. The rest of the players were blue-collar British guys who weren’t being paid to play American football. They figured at least we knew the game. The four of us played, coached, lived in a house together, lifted weights in the morning, hit golf balls in the afternoon and hung out in the local pubs at night, all with equal vigor. I was single. I was playing the game I loved. I was having the time of my life. I especially took to the coaching part. Working with the Brits during our evening practices. Trying to teach them things I knew about the game. Seeing actual improvement. I got real satisfaction out of that and seemed to have some talent for it.

It was right in that period that the thought finally clarified in my mind. Maybe I wasn’t going to be a top-level professional quarterback. But coaching, I decided early that summer, really could be the thing for me. I was also starting to hear stories from my friends back home. They were twenty-two or twenty-three by then. They were buying nice little houses on the outskirts of town. They were starting careers, getting married, having babies and getting on with their lives. I was feeling like I needed to move on. Staying in England forever wasn’t much of an option. So how was I going to find a coaching job?

IT WAS TIME TO
return to America.

I remembered from my days at Eastern Illinois that there was such a thing as a graduate assistant in a college football program. The assistants weren’t full-time coaches. But they would pass out rosters, edit film and perform any other tasks the coaches told them to. This was the entry level, the absolute ground floor of the college coaching world. It wasn’t even officially a job. Instead of a salary, the graduate assistants got grad school tuition and room and board. These positions were still hard to get. But if you got one and caught the eye of the real coaches on your staff, maybe they’d hire you eventually as an actual assistant—or recommend you to one of their coaching friends. It definitely sounded better than painting condos in Naperville.