The Sunday Evening Post: Super Bowl 44

Our resident Saints fan has the story of the Super Bowl's unlikely hero.

Tracy Porter was born in Baton Rouge, played at Indiana, picked off Favre and Manning to ensure both championship wins.

It's easy to try to link sports with scripted drama, or weight one above the other because of a preference for either the unpredictable or the precisely crafted. It's just as easy to predict that Tracy Porter's story will be dramatized in a half-dozen magazine pieces and softly-lit accounts of triumph on television.

But it's also easy to see that the simplicity of who he is, what he does, and how the simple recurs in new and novel ways, is what makes sports so universal.

Porter's job is to prevent the other team from scoring, mostly by defending against the pass. He can lift as many weights, study as much film, or put in as much practice as he wants, but he's just adding layers of complexity to a task that can be performed by kids in back yards.

And what did he do on a play he gets to relive for the rest of his life? See ball. Run to ball. Catch ball. Run to end zone.

It was simple, and, for Saints fans, singularly beautiful. So is Tracy Porter: A child of Louisiana, with history in Indiana, whose redemption in recent weeks is the sort of thing that makes one think Fitzgerald could not have been more wrong.

A similar simplicity will drive Peyton Manning nuts for a while.

This was only rarely considered New Orleans playing Indianapolis in a lot of fans' minds. That's how much Peyton Manning's pedigree and talent are esteemed; he makes the rest of team seem like an afterthought. He is the guy who makes solving the equation of complex offenses plus chaotic defenses look like addition when so many struggle with football's calculus. And he is the guy whose physical tools enable him to make throwing a football to any place on the field look like the most natural thing in the world.

And he simply made the biggest mistake of his football career on one pass, thrown to the wrong part of the field, into the wrong player's arms.

It helps that we know exactly who Manning is, too. He's simply the definition of the modern quarterback, who works harder and smarter than anyone else, and gets bit by chance or kismet or fate every so often. We get that, or we give him the "choker" label. Either one works.

We're left with the Saints' ecstasy and Peyton Manning's agony. And this memory will be forever seared into the memories of quintessential underdogs who brought joy to the once-sodden French Quarter, and forever seared into the minds of the Colts, who came this far only to come so close and seem to repeat a cycle of being good enough to get to the mountain, but not great enough to summit it. 

And the bits of the story that are simple, small things come together. It's how Haiti, the dismissal of Drew Brees, Dwight Freeney's ankle, Darren Sharper's odyssey, Tom Benson's churlishness, Sean Payton's brilliance, and the anguish of Colts fans are all part of this Super Bowl.

This is what sports leave us with, moments that become trends that become patterns that become arcs, and arcs that intertwine as strands of a greater tapestry.

In several months, football starts again. And the simple stories unfold again. This is how it is. And how it always will be.

Simple? Sure. But in shards, sports provide great snapshots of the human experience, in stories, simplicity at is most riveting.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.