A quick gameday note: Hello to all of the Faithful (and the occasional Son of the Bayou) dropping by to check out my humble piece about our beloved team. Self-indulgence – you can find me on twitter @sakeichiban (I’ll be live tweeting from my favorite bar, @TempestSF) and please feel free to leave a gameday note. Been overwhelmed by the positive response, so thank you a million times over.

Just wrote a gameday piece genetically engineered to get the Faithful pumped up to the point where hearts may explode.

Now, and much more importantly, here’s to the team, The Team, THE TEAM. Who’s got it better than us?

Playoff football isn’t just about the black and white of numbers and facts and past performance. Playoff football is about the gray areas, the stuff that’s impossible to quantify. It’s about the stuff that we ignore until it becomes unavoidable, at which point we start using superlatives: destiny, miracle, God. If we take as a given that the two teams match up evenly – which the Niners and Saints do – one must adjust his sails for the murky waters.

One must account for magic.

The greatest factor at play in these games is the kind of magic that courses through of each team’s city. Why do you think things like Lebron and The Drive happen to Cleveland, time and time again? Doesn’t matter what they build a monument to (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, seriously?), the fact remains: There’s no mystique to Cleveland, there’s no romance. Where there should be an electric current, there are only rusted factories, flickering streetlights and boarded up car dealerships. Conversely, why do you think the 2010 San Francisco Giants won a World Series with a crew of misfits and castoffs? A cynic would say pitching and defense, and be content to leave it at that. And, yes, of course those components made up a big part of the story. But that cynic isn’t bothering to mention the sheer and impossible absurdity of Cody Ross becoming a hitting machine, of Renteria resurrecting himself to win World Series MVP honors, or any of the dozen things that couldn’t then and still cannot be explained by logic.

And here I foolishly thought that baseball is supposed to be the most predictable, logically numbers-driven sport.

So why did every star align for that team? Consider the teams that stood in their way: Atlanta, Philly, Dallas. The Giants play in San Francisco. If you try to tell me there’s magic to the city of Dallas, I will slap you in order to try to knock the insanity out from your brain. Dallas has great steak and barbeque. Philly has Rocky. Atlanta is, well, Atlanta is surprisingly cool.

But San Francisco has fog. She has alleyway bars. She is a city built and rebuilt by gold miners, gamblers, backroom dealers, prostitutes, Chinese railroad builders, and their sons and daughters. An earthquake destroyed this place and her inhabitants said, “Okay, where do we keep the tools again?” A fire burned her down and her lovers said, “Let’s do it again.” They saw hills and built trolleys pulled by cables to climb them. They felt the cold, got lost in the mist, and said to each other, “This feels like home.”

The city’s signature bread literally cannot be recreated elsewhere because the enzymes needed to make the stuff sour lives exclusively in our water air. If that isn’t magic, tell me, what is?

Unfortunately, we’re up against a team that hails from a similarly spiritual part of the country: New Orleans. If we have the romance of the hippies and beat poets on our side, they bring the opposite sort of mystique: voodoo. Black magic. Witch doctors. Potions and bubbling cauldrons and the swampland. All of American music traveled down the bends of the Mississippi River to New Orleans and gave birth to the blues, to jazz, and to rock and roll. It’s gumbo and crawfish; it’s A Streetcar Named Desire; it’s a drink called The Hurricane. It’s Mardi Gras. It’s Hurricane Katrina, and then the stubborn reaction to that American tragedy: “Okay, where do we keep the tools again?”

No, New Orleans ain’t Cleveland. The Saints match up frighteningly well with us in this category, and they come from perhaps the only city that can claim this to be true. That said, the Saints already rode that magic to a championship in 2009. There’s a reason that the team became so great after Drew Brees made his home in New Orleans, and claimed the community as his own. The city – all its history, heartache, triumph – became a part of him; he is no longer Drew Brees, he’s become Drew Brees Plus. That alone wasn’t enough, so the voodoo that lingered in the Superdome since Katrina’s victims took shelter under its roof grew in strength as the team grew in unity. Voodoo crushed Kurt Warner and his will to fight back. It bamboozled Brett Favre into throwing the single stupidest pass of his entire, generally stupid career (in the words of the famous Minnesota radio call of that play: “This is not Detroit, man; this is the Super Bowl!“). That dark magic then traveled with the team (and probably Archie Manning, who probably loves his city more than either of his boys) to Miami – 666 miles away, which is so perfect that it cannot possibly be a coincidence – to ambush Peyton Manning and the favored Indianapolis Colts (note: ain’t no magic in Indiana) with a surprise onside kick and recurring double vision (how else would you explain the Peyton Manning pick six?).

The day after that Super Bowl? Mardi Gras. The Saints became extensions of their home. They carried on their shoulder pads the desire of every dreamer in that region and, in doing so, became a force millions strong. Of course they couldn’t be defeated.

But the Saints, a year after leveraging this advantage, lost in the romantic, rain-drenched city of Seattle. Our magic remains intact. Advantage, San Francisco.

If it was just the slim city head-to-head advantage, I’d be much more nervous than I am. But consider this: it’s the 30th anniversary of The Catch, the single most significant and, yes, magical moment in NFL history*. Before the Catch, Ronnie Lott was still playing cornerback. Joe Montana was still Joe “Didn’t That Kid Play for the Irish?” Montana. Bill Walsh’s coaching tree was just a sapling, consisting only of himself and a crazy offense named for the Golden Coast. And the 13-3 1981 Niners were just a year removed from going 6-10, two years from an appalling 2-14 finish.

Coincidence: (noun) 1. What the Universe does for fun.

That all this is happening now, on the 30th anniversary of what is essentially the birth of our team, is impossible to ignore. The symmetry is too perfect.

We’ve seen this sort of team before. We’ve seen them in the 1999 Rams, led by a quarterback, once banished to the ghettos of arena football and bagboy duties, who improbably acted as the fulcrum of the Greatest Show on Turf. We’ve seen them in the 2001 Patriots, a gang of nobodies, led by a sixth round nobody who replaced a first-round Somebody, capital S, who won against their heavily favored opponents in a game watched by a still-reeling, just-barely-comprehending-9/11 nation.

We’ve seen them in the 2009 Saints. We’ve seen them in the 1981 San Francisco Forty-Niners.

There are rare moments when a team gets marked with the fingerprints of destiny. There are moments that defy logic, throw advanced metrics in the gutter, and allow us to remember why we watch these games in the first place. If transcendence wasn’t possible, why would we ever tune in? Why would we care?

Ghosts walk among us, and we see them manifest themselves in our sports.

We retell these unaging stories because we look to them for physical evidence of the inexplicable. Every heart that has ever been broken wants to believe that life is more than the weight of numbers and facts and probability. Sports lore are our Homeric legends. That’s why we see the same archetypes pop up time and time again, and see the same themes interwoven into the fabric of every story:

Redemption;

Salvation;

The long suffering hero, long since fallen from grace, finding redemption when none thought it possible;

A fearless boy heaving a stone at impossible odds and the head of a giant;

The college coach, emerging from nowhere, taking the reigns of a struggling team, and restoring glory to a city.

I don’t know if we’re going to win this thing. The Saints have Drew Brees (Plus), and fight with fire in their veins. When the Saints play at home, surrounded by their tens of thousands of voodoo-practitioner fans, they are still just as electric as they were in 2009. They get laced with an irrepressible black magic, play as though they were the embodiment of the horsemen of the apocalypse, and cannot – will not – be beaten. That’s the sort of thing that happens when the team takes on all the strength and pain of a city.

Flip that talisman over, though, and you see that the witch doctor aura doesn’t travel well. And the Saints are traveling far, far away. They are coming here. They are coming to face off against our own formidable team, in – and you’ll excuse me for this dip into cliche – our house. This is our house. That means that the Saints will also be facing down our city, and all the spirits and spells at her fingertips. On Saturday, they will find themselves fending off the hands of, not only Patrick Willis and NaVorro Bowman, not only Justin and Aldon Smith, but also of the ghosts and memories too ingrained in the blood of Bill Walsh Field at Candlestick Park to ever dissipate into the cold San Francisco air.

When our fans roar, the Saints will hear the echoes of 1981. And they will despair, for they will know that they are outnumbered. They will be deafened, isolated, scared. They will be in our house. Ghosts walk among us, and we see them manifest themselves in our sports.

The 2011 Niners are not their 1981 forbearers, not exactly, but doesn’t this story feel familiar? Doesn’t this sound like a bedtime fairy tale that your old man once told you?

Doesn’t this sound, just a little bit, like the approaching footsteps of destiny?

*One of my favorite stories about this play is that Joe Montana was knocked to the ground by Cowboy defensive lineman Too-Tall Jones, and couldn’t tell how the play turned out until he heard the roar of the Candlestick crowd. Jones, while still towering over Montana, growled, “You just beat America’s Team.” Montana, still on the ground, an up-and-down game of three interceptions behind him, all the adrenaline in the city coursing through his thin frame, replied, “Well, you can sit at home with the rest of America and watch the Super Bowl.”

Ronnie Lott on Joe Montana: “Who is this guy, Montana? ‘I’m John Wayne. I’m John Wayne. And John Wayne never loses. I’m making this throw.'”