Patriots emerge as a Super power

America At Large: Imagine, if you will, a man with the precise dimensions of the sideshow heavyweight boxer Eric Esch, his shaved head and face painted red, white, and blue. Dress him up in a New England Patriots jersey, pump him full of Jello Shots and Hurricanes until he passes out. Just before tucking him in, plant him on the front stoop of the Bourbon Street Blues Company and wedge his 350lb body into the door so tightly no one can get in or out of the saloon.

"What am I supposed to do, call for a fork-lift?" asked the beleaguered bouncer as he contemplated the hopelessness of the situation.

Several of the butterbean doppelganger's still-conscious compatriots were slapping his comatose face in an effort to revive him. "If you can't wake him up," the doorman warned his friends, "I'm gonna ask one of those National Guardsmen over there to shoot him and drag his body away." With that, the fellow's buddies banded together and, with a mighty shove, managed to roll him onto the sidewalk, where he remained for the next hour while throngs of passers-by gingerly avoided the snoring hump.

And the Super Bowl was still four days away.

It brought back memories of a similar occurrence in the same spot 16 years earlier. In an earlier incarnation the bar had been called Ryan's Irish Pub, and, following a well-chronicled Super Bowl-week visit from then-Boston mayor Ray Flynn, it had been immediately transformed into the de facto Patriots headquarters for the balance of that year's festivities.

A few days before that game I was at the bar when I was summoned to the gents' room by a mortified New England player. One of his team-mates, having drunk himself legless, had tripped on his way out of the men's room and pitched face-first into the old-fashioned cast-iron watering trough which served as a urinal. We somehow managed to dislodge him from this predicament, pack him into a taxi, and send him on his slimy way back to the team hotel.

Super Bowl XXXVI marked the ninth time football's ultimate game had been played in New Orleans. A one-week postponement due to the interruption in the NFL schedule also made this the first Super Bowl week to overlap with Mardi Gras, and that the game was the first to be played under draconian post-September 11th security measures made for an even odder contrast.

The entire operation was supervised by the US Secret Service, who oversaw a multi-agency force consisting of New Orleans and Louisiana State police, camouflaged National Guardsmen with automatic weapons, plain-clothes FBI operatives, and the NFL's yellow-jacketed security men. Journalists covering the proceedings grew accustomed to metal detectors and body searches every time they entered the media centre or ventured into one of the team hotels for the daily round of press conferences.

While all of this was taking place, simultaneously, not a half-mile away, thousands of freely inebriated football fans and Mardi Gras celebrants, faithfully attended by small battalions of pickpockets and roving platoons of prostitutes, caroused their way through the French Quarter. It made for a decidedly otherwordly juxtaposition: America's most cheerfully lawless environment, surrounded by the most stringent security procedures ever placed around a sporting event.

In time-honoured New Orleans tradition, bands of (usually) young men paraded down Bourbon Street clutching $8 drinks, imploring any unattached females to "Please show us your breasts." Although, come to think of it, they rarely said "please" and "breasts" wasn't the word they usually used. If someone was willing to part with a strand of cheap Mardi Gras beads, they were accommodated with surprising frequency.

The tens of thousands of Patriots fans descending on Bourbon Street had come prepared for the worst. The team had never in its 42-year history won a Super Bowl and had been beaten by an aggregate 49 points in its two previous tries, both of which had come in New Orleans. New England had been cast as 14-point underdogs to the high-flying Rams, and not even the supporters of the over-achieving Patriots could dispute that prognosis.

Since even star St Louis running back Marshall Faulk, a New Orleans native who as a youngster sold popcorn in the Louisiana Superdome, conceded the Super Bowl venue "would make a good target" for would-be terrorists, the extraordinary precautions taken on game day were a welcome comfort. Air space over New Orleans was restricted, and jet fighters patrolled the skies. Even an inter-state highway which passes near the stadium was closed for the day.

Super Bowl XXXVI had, in the meantime, also been surrounded with the trappings of a rock concert, with Paul McCartney performing beforehand and U2 during the half-time festivities.

"We're here to bring peace between the AFL and the NFL," Bono explained a few days beforehand, a somewhat baffling pronouncement in that the American and National Football Leagues had merged some 33 years earlier and had happily been dividing up the spoils ever since.

Asked for his preference in the New England-Rams match-up, McCartney said: "Well, I'm from (old) England, but I did make an album called Ram." If the game itself threatened to become anti-climactic after all of this, it wasn't. The scrappy Patriots took a 17-3 lead into the fourth quarter, only to watch the Rams launch two quick strikes to tie the game.

Then, with a minute and a half to play, New England quarterback Tom Brady moved his team downfield, and Adam Vinatieri booted a 48-yard field goal, the ball passing through the uprights as the last second ticked off the clock to end what has been anointed the most thrilling finish in Super Bowl history.

Two days later a million and a quarter people lined the streets of Boston to toast the Patriots' victory. Ty Law, the New England cornerback who had intercepted a Kurt Warner pass and returned it for a score in the game, recreated the event, along with his celebratory "touchdown dance" on the stage at City Hall Plaza, and then even cajoled team-owner Robert Kraft to join in on the impromptu boogaloo. It had been 42 years in the making, but it was almost worth waiting for.