Drew Brees | New Orleans | Super Bowl | Brittany | National Football League

The Saint

by Joseph Guinto

All-Pro quarterback Drew Brees has revived New Orleans's moribund football franchise and lifted the city's battered spiits Here's where he makes his Crescent City connections off the field. . Illustration by Tim Bower

It was not a hot and humid and steamy and quiet New Orleans night in the clichéd "Stanley Kowalski sweating though his undershirt" sense, but rather a wet and wintry and cold and quiet New Orleans night that Drew Brees returned to hours after falling one game short of the Super Bowl. Luckily, the glum weather was good for preserving the gumbo.

It was nearing three a.m. when Brees walked up the steps of the Uptown New Orleans home he and his wife, Brittany, had bought the prior winter. The couple - college sweethearts who met at Purdue University - had spent almost a year restoring the 100-plus-year-old place, a project that included making $50,000 of Hurricane Katrina-related roof repairs. Brittany was stuck in Chicago, where victorious fans were cheering their Super Bowl-bound Bears after the 39-14 dismantling of the Saints. Brees, though, had taken the team charter back to New Orleans and driven himself home from the airport. The drive, normally 30 minutes, had taken him nearly two hours. Saints fans had lined the road from the team's private air terminal, forming a two-mile collection of cars and people and banners and umbrellas. Brees had inched along in his car, signing autographs and shaking hands while people thanked him for turning in the best season of his six-year NFL career - one that earned him the starting quarterback's job in the Pro Bowl - and for leading the Saints to their best season in the team's 39-year history. For hurricane-weary New Orleans, the Saints' success could not have come at a better time.