It was a stirring performance by both sides. Falcons linebacker Curtis Lofton pounded his fist into the turf after Pierre Thomas bowled over him for a first down. The game-sealing carry provided the perfect punctuation for the Saints' undrafted, second-year running back following the most important performance of his young career.
He scored his first touchdown on a 7-yard screen early in the fourth quarter, powering in for the winning touchdown on a 5-yard toss sweep, bouncing over offensive lineman Carl Nicks as he stretched for the goal line. Thomas also set up that last score with an 88-yard kickoff return after Matt Ryan's 12-yard scramble had given the Falcons a 25-22 lead with 7:51 to go.
Actually I didn't write that. I cut-and-pasted it out of the local paper, whose reporter clearly has at least a rudimentary understanding of the game. Unlike me.
I once spent a year at evening classes trying to learn Japanese, but it was a waste of twelve months; everything the teacher said just went in one ear and out the other. I've had just as little success comprehending the byzantine complexities of football: at least a dozen people have tried valiantly to explain it to me, but they were just wasting their breath.
As an experiment, I tried to read the Wikipedia article on American football before I wrote this entry, but I dozed off over my laptop after a couple of pages.
If the ball becomes dead behind the goal line of the team in possession and its "opponent" is responsible for the ball being there (for instance, if the defense intercepts a forward pass in its own end zone and the ball becomes dead before the ball is advanced out of the end zone) it is a touchback: no points are scored and the team last in possession keeps possession with a first down at its own 20 yard line. In college, in the extremely rare instance that a safety is scored on a try, it is worth only 1 point.Incomprehension aside, I enjoyed the experience very much. From outside, the Superdome is a vast and sinister concrete nuclear bunker set amid a wasteland of elevated highways and crumbling warehouses, but when we emerged into the arena itself it took my breath away.
This is the third largest domed structure in the world, twenty-seven storeys high, and our seats were about as far away from the action as it was possible to be.
It was like watching the match through the wrong end of a telescope. But this didn't seem to deter our fellow spectators, many of them season ticket holders with their row and seat numbers printed on their t-shirts.
Speaking of which, this must be the only place in America where dressing your offspring in shirts with BUSH inscribed on the back doesn't constitute child abuse, like calling your son Adolf Hitler. The shirts we saw were a homage not to the soon-to-be-ex-chief-executive, but to Saints legend Reggie Bush.
I abandoned my attempts to make sense of the on-pitch action - constant substitutions, points mysteriously appearing on the scoreboard for no visible reason, incomprehensible announcements from referees - and concentrated on soaking up the atmosphere instead.
It was like a vast, rowdy communal Sunday lunch: 70,000 deliriously happy people scoffing grotesquely overpriced burgers, chicken wings and beers and walking out when the mounds of wrappers and cans on the floor made it impossible to see the players any more.
The Saints won, and we marched in a long, slow spiral out of the Dome. As is so often the case here, I felt both totally at home and an utter outsider.
I also experienced a twinge of envy. Football has a lot in common with religion, practised on Sundays by huge numbers of chanting people in big, echoey buildings. If you don't experience that weekly injection of passion from one or the other, or both, you're hard put to find its equivalent elsewhere.
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