No team ever meant so much to a city. No city ever needed it more.

I won’t try to hide my conflict of interest. I grew up in New Orleans - like all Saints fans, a long-suffering Saints fan. It was a character-building experience and not always the fun kind.

I understand: Even now, some people aren’t impressed.

The bookies have dissed us. The sports editors, too. The rundown from Friday’s sports pages: “Mann with a Plan,” “Colts’ OL: Nobody gets near Peyton,” “Big Easy for Eli: Let’s Go, Bro,” “Manning’s New Alter Ego” and “Freeney to Test Ankle” - genuflections all to the altar of Indianapolis, beautifully illustrated with men in blue and white. And for balance? A noncommittal three-paragraph brief: “Saints’ game plan almost complete.”

Gee, thanks. Who dat hyping dem Colts?

But the Saints didn’t get here by accident, and the journey has been something to behold. A struggling city and a struggling team, lifting themselves together, the triumph and inspiration running both ways.

Saints quarterback Drew Brees put it quite nicely: “You go through adversity, you go through tough times like the people of New Orleans have, and it happens to make you stronger. It happens to unite you. That’s what’s happened here in this city and this town and this community.

“It’s destiny,” he said.

It is. Be part of it. Be for the team that needs you. Be for the Saints.

SNOW-MEGEDDON!
1. Fooled you!
2. Seal of Disapproval from the American Meteorological Society 3. Change the headline to “Light Dusting Fails to Paralyze LI”
4. Better hysterical than sorry
5. Quit your bellyaching! You’d rather be shoveling your driveway?

SHOW TIME: It was planned as a “typical, two-week training mission” for the 106th Rescue Wing of the New York Air National Guard, based at Gabreski Field in Westhampton Beach. But since the Haitian earthquake, the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay has been a key logistical hub for the U.S. military. For the 40 LI airmen, including civilian carpenters, electricians and heavy-equipment operators, there was real work to be done. Building an access road. Clearing debris. Extending a vital airstrip. “We have a well-rounded base of individuals who bring a variety of trades to the table,” Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Vincent Fondacaro said. “The value of this experience for my guys is getting to see how to operate in this joint environment.”

ASKED AND UNANSWERED: Snow science or snow guesswork? Were they smart or lucky this time? . . . You think you had a bad week? Tell me: Was your week worse than Akio Toyoda’s? He’s chief executive of Toyota. Feel better now? . . . What’s the right new name for the LI Ducks’ ballpark? Anyone for LI Ducks Ball Park? . . . What is it about a mannequin that makes a story irresistible? The national media sure seemed tickled by Kathleen Frascinella’s mannequin-in-the-shotgun-seat ticket. . . . Big, tough LIRR locomotive can’t get through 10 inches of snow? How would the railroaders of yesterday feel about that? . . . When Christopher Cox was a boy, what pet name did he have for his famous and formal grandpa, Richard M. Nixon? “Mr. President”? Chris, 30, is one of seven Republicans hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Tim Bishop.

HEROES OF THE WEEK
THE SNOW PEOPLE

So in the end, we didn’t really need them. But there they were, and they deserve our gratitude nonetheless. An Army of first-flake responders, assembled and waiting just in case. Hotrodders on snowbloeers. Cowboys in pickups with plows. Twelve-year-olds with shovels and a work ethics. Sanitation workers on overtime. Stand down now. But do not worry. The call will come again.

“It’s News to Us”

You think it’s tough being a Mets fan?

Try rooting for a team where you have to wear a paper bag over your head. Things once got so desperate for us Saints fans, anonymous suffocation seemed like an reasonable alternative.

I grew up in New Orleans. I have learned triumphs delayed
are the sweetest triumphs, even if the delay part isn’t much fun.

In the very first game of the very first season of the expansion
New Orleans Saints, Sept. 19, 1967, wide receiver John Gilliam returned the opening kickoff 94 yards for a touchdown.

Guys my dad’s age thought, “Wow, this is easy!” And 43 years
later, they have something else to cheer about.

All Saints fans secretly fear we must be dreaming. The Saints
in the Super Bowl? Come on!

Beloved New Orleans sportscaster Buddy Diliberto vowed he’d wear a dress and dance in the street if the Saints made the Super Bowl. Buddy’s gone now to the great Superdome in the Sky, but the other day a throng of New Orleans men, led by former Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert, dolled up in dresses and heels and marched to the French Quarter from the Dome.

What’s so amazing isn’t just that the NFL’s perennial losers
are conference champions now.

Not even that they have a decent underdog’s shot in the Super Bow. Turnarounds happen in sports all the time.

Here’s what’s really amazing: The miracle recovery of the Saints truly has inspired — and been inspired by — a post-Katrina miracle recovery of New Orleans. The two are rising together.

“This stadium used to have holes in it and used to be wet,”
coach Sean Payton said after the Saints’ NFC victory over the Vikings.

“It’s not wet anymore. This is for the city of New Orleans.”
So who else are you gonna be for on Sunday? The powerhouse
Indianapolis Colts?

Be for the team that needs you, America’s team of miracle
recovery. The Aints ain’t the Aints any more.

This whole fiscal responsibility thing can get a little dicey. Sometimes people actually hold you to what you say.

Just ask Peter Schmitt.

The new presiding officer of the Nassau Legislature, who swept in with County Executive Edward Mangano in November’s anti-incumbent wave, is a tightfisted, lean-government, no-waste conservative. Or so he’d been telling everyone.

Then on Monday, Schmitt got his fellow Republicans, on a strict party-line, to ram through a whopping pay-raise package for legislative leaders, including an extra 47 percent for himself.

Sweet!

But dumb!

On his way to the bank, he handed the Democratic minority a big fat club to beat him with. Mr. Tight Fist was suddenly Mr. Spend-Spend-Spend!

Still smarting from the unexpected success of Republicans’ tax-and-spend rhetoric, Dems were more than eager to pounce. Their leader, Diane Yatauro, knew an issue when she saw one and announced she would not accept the pay raise. If forced to by law, she’d hand the money to charity.

This was too easy, almost.

By week’s end, even Schmitt had seen the glaring light. He announced he would propose Monday that the raises be reversed.

With the straightest faces they could muster, Democrats kept milking the debacle into the weekend.

“It sounds like Rip Van Winkle just woke up,” Yatauro said, inserting the knife and spinning a few more times. “It’s as if he just found out that Nassau’s residents are faced with unemployment, foreclosures and low sales tax numbers.”

Lesson learned?

True Slogans:
1. Lean times, fat raises
2. Public service, where the money is
3 .Belt tightening is for wimps
4. This is a bargain compared to 50 percent
5. Fun with deficits

ASKED AND UNANSWERED: Any welcome-home parties for soon-to-be-ex-con schools embezzler Frank Tassone? Nothing planned in Roslyn yet . . . A telemarketer? Accused of deception? You mean those super-aggressive police “charities” aren’t all on the up-and-up? . . . Gov. David A. Paterson thought he should discuss his marriage and infidelity on “The View” — why? . . . Anyone ready to say the 21-year-old drinking age isn’t working so well? Maybe it even encourages binge drinking by 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds? Is that one message from the Central Islip crash? . . . Measles in Nassau? What’s next? Mumps? Whooping cough? Are parents getting lax with childhood inoculations? . . . When Mariah Carey decided to prank husband Nick Cannon with a porn call to his radio show, did she really have to be “Debbie from Long Island”? OK, so she comes from Huntington . . . Another bum rap for Michael Lohan? Lindsay’s dad must be the unluckiest celebrity father in the world . . . Instead of opening a phony pay-stub factory, why not just open a factory that makes stuff and then pay the employees? . . . Turnaround any day now? How much patience does fourth-term Supervisor Jon Kaiman expect North Hempstead to show?

ELLIS HERO OF THE WEEK

EAST SIDE ACCESS TUNNEL CREW

These are tough times for public transit. Pinched spending. Threatened service cuts. Eternally grumpy passengers.But work is seemingly rolling along quite nicely on the LIRR’s Grand Central connector, which will ease the 180,000 daily commuters. Keep digging, foilks. Don’t look back. Deadline 2016. Want proof? See the snappy new photos — progress! — at the MTA’s Facebook Fan Page. Yes, the MTA has a Facebook Fan Page. With 386 friends by week’s end. And counting.

Leno’s a flop at 10. Conan’s an “astounding failure” at 11:35. Jimmy Kimmel’s the rudest guest in the history of late-night TV.

Is it comedy? Is it drama? It’s a whole new form of late-night train wreck where all the engineers are over-coddled and overpaid. And NBC is still in fourth place.

But viewers have a whole new reason to stay awake.

The Emmy for Nastiest Slam on a Colleague goes to Kimmel: “Listen Jay,” he said, “Conan and I have children, all you have to take care of is cars. I mean, we have lives to lead here, you’ve got $800 million. For God’s sake, leave our shows alone.”

The Emmy for Pseudo-Concern goes to Conan: Young people, he allowed, should believe they can “do anything you want in life - unless Jay Leno wants to do it, too.”

And the Emmy for Keeping Your Cool and Coming Out on Top? Leno gets that one, for sure.

While Kimmel burns bridges and Conan heads for Fox, Jay is getting his old job back, the one he was pushed from so unceremoniously and so recently.

The others got better zingers off. But Jay’s the one who will be smiling in the end.

HEY, 2-1-1

1. Can the Jets really win again?

2. Will the Lighthouse project ever be built?

3. Is an expressway still an expressway if nobody‘s moving?

4. Has anyone considered marketing Plum Island plums?

5. Why’s 3-1-1 in the city and 2-1-1 here?

NEXT STOP: All big bureaucracies have duplication and waste. But as chairman Jay Walder works to streamline the sprawling MTA, he may find that some long-standing redundancies actually make sense. Surely, he can turn the MetroCard a multiagency swipe and combine some of those 92 customer-service numbers. But how much will be saved - and how much useful knowledge will be lost - by lumping all the travel-information operators into a single subway-LIRR-MetroNorth call center? Here’s a better goal: Make sure they actually take the trains they’re advising about!

ASKED AND UNANSWERED: Homecoming queen, $1,000 Intel semifinalist - and what else? If Jennie Shapira is also the leading scorer on Hewlett High’s basketball team, I don’t want to know . . . Did Hofstra’s final fumble really play no role in convincing Nassau Community College to start offering football scholarships? . . . Time to rewrite the high-speed police-chase protocol? Latest crash was Wednesday on Ocean Avenue in Valley Stream - over pot in a car . . . With Junior Gotti enjoying his first weekend of freedom in five years, are his old Gambino pals making book on the odds he keeps his nose clean? . . . Those day laborers tossed from Huntington Station’s Fifth Street woods - where exactly are they sleeping tonight? . . . How soon ’til the Haitian-rescue story turns into an ugly political debate about Haitian refugees? . . . Do you know the name Bryce Larsen? You will. “Idol” judge Randy Jackson was unequivocal with the North Shore High substitute: “You’re going to Hollywood!” . . . As the Heckscher Museum’s “Arcadia/Suburbia” show touts 80 years worth of LI architecture, some local designers are wondering: Whose current work will seem exciting 80 years from now? Anyone’s? . . . When will the new 211 helpline start doing legwork for columnists?

ELLIS’ HEROES OF THE WEEK
STUDENTS OF UNIONDALE HIGH

All decent people feel sympathy. This weekend’s grief is impossible to avoid. But when the earthquake hit near Port au Prince, it sent some of its most severe aftershocks to places like Uniondale High School, where 163 of students are of Haitian descent. “It’s very, very hard,” principal Florence Simmons said. Sophomore Javan Williams couldn’t reach his father. Pierre Julie Abraham was still holding out hope for her brother. Senior Aide Jean got a call at school from mother. Her father, an accounting professor in the Haitian capital, was crushed to death in class. What’s a teacher or a principal or a caring community suppose to tell kids like that?

Get ready, Eastern Parkway. You too, Cambria Heights.

Fire up the griot pot. The Haitians are coming to New York.

As sure as Port-au-Prince is now in shambles, a huge new wave of Haitian refugees will soon be heading north.

And controversy almost certainly will greet them.

This has been the story of New York since the days of the Irish potato famine, even before. Something bad happens somewhere.

People suffer terribly. They flee to somewhere they already have friends and relatives - the great immigrant city of New York.

Now a 7.0-magnitude earthquake starts the cycle again.

For the next few days, attention will be focused on rescue and recovery. But with the Rev. Pat Robertson warning about an ancient “deal with the devil” and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh saying Haiti really doesn’t need U.S. help, “Haitian refugees” could easily become a hot-button issue.

The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t yet approved the Temporary Protective Status that would allow Haitian refugees to stay here without fear of immediate deportation. But that could be coming soon. “TPS is in the range of considerations we consider in a disaster,” said department spokesman Matthew Chandler.

By Wednesday night, Washington already had agreed to temporarily halt Haitian deportations. And by Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton was raising the possibility of temporary asylum for the coming refugees.

“Most [Haitians] are here legally,” the secretary of state said. “Some are not documented. And the Obama administration is taking steps to make sure that people are given some temporary status so that we don’t compound the problem.”

The challenge is huge and predictable.

Their homeland, already the poorest in the Americas, almost certainly will be unable to support however much of the population survives. The lucky ones soon will be seeking somewhere to live, somewhere to work, somewhere to be treated for their injuries, somewhere to start again.

Somewhere like New York.

He was “completely shocked” he lost.

He’s unlikely to run for local or county office again, though maybe for something on the state or federal level.

He’s proud to have turned “the worst-run county in America” into a government that is “much more professional and better run and more financially secure than it’s been in decades.”

He doesn’t have a new job lined up.

Thursday is Thomas Suozzi’s last day as Nassau County executive, beaten unexpectedly by a low-profile Republican legislator after eight whirlwind years. And with his boxes already gone from the big Mineola office, the man often described as the quintessential modern suburban leader has turned suddenly self-reflective.

“When change like this happens,” Suozzi said, “you have to make something positive out of it. It’s not like, ‘Oh, what a shame, and I’m discouraged.’ This is what happens in life. The challenge for me and the people who have worked with me, my team, is to find fresh new ways to contribute. And we will.”

They have plenty to feel good about, he said.

“I’m handing off to Ed Mangano a very well running government, a professional $2.6-billion enterprise,” Suozzi said. “The workforce is the smallest it’s been in 30 years. The crime rate is the lowest it’s been in 30 years. The bond rating is the highest it’s been in 20 years.”

Two big problems haunt: “One, the national economy and its effect on our budget. And two, the assessment system. That has to be reformed.”

He gives himself much lower marks on politics.

“The people who turned out to vote were mad as hell about property taxes. It didn’t matter that the county executive doesn’t control a big part of what they were angry about.”

And he was caught off guard.

“I was completely shocked that I lost,” he said. “It was totally unexpected. I had no inkling of the possibility until 9:05 on election night. Every election night, I check the polling results at the place my wife and I vote, the middle school in Glen Cove. Three districts vote there, and I won huge. But I noticed turnout was 25 percent lower than it had been in 2005. I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this turnout is so low.’ Then, as I was driving in, I thought to myself, ‘Can you imagine if I lost?’ And then, ‘Aw, that’s impossible.’ “

Does he kick himself for not spending more of his pile of campaign cash?

“There are no less than 100 different things I could have done differently to get 386 more votes,” he said. “The reality is it just wasn’t meant to be.”

Suozzi said he’ll go to work in the private sector - at a law firm, an investment bank or in some corporate position. “Certainly, I’m going to be able to make more money,” he said.

And what about another run for office?

“Never say never,” he said, “but let’s just say it’s 95 percent certain that I will never run again for local office or county office. If I ever do again, it will only be for statewide or federal office. I was the mayor of my hometown. I was the executive of my home county. It’s time to do some new things.”

But the timing would have to be right.

“When I became county executive, it couldn’t have been at a better time,” he said. “The birthplace of the suburbs was a fiscal shipwreck. There was so much opportunity for change. My Fix Albany campaign in 2004, saving billions of dollars with the Medicaid cap, that was great timing. But when I ran for governor, talk about bad timing! The guy I ran against, Eliot Spitzer, was a superhero, and I didn’t have a shot. If it was a year later, I’d be governor.”

And his bid in November for a third county term? Terrible timing.

“The height of the anti-tax, anti-incumbent feeling,” the outgoing Nassau executive said. “Here I was, trying to be the leader of the tax revolt, and I was the victim of it.”

Some of that PETN must have seeped into the atmosphere. There’s so much cloudy thinking floating around!

It started with Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano declaring giddily: “the system worked.”

Before she backtracked.

It continued as the Transportation Security Adminstration threw its full bureaucratic gravitas behind a stricter no-peeing and no-blankets rule.

Before they backtracked.

And now half of cable news apparently is convinced: Barack Obama is personally staffing a terrorist-concierge service, welcoming suicide bombers aboard the commercial airliners of their choice.

Still waiting for the backtracking on that one.

Feel free to disagree with this or that administration policy. Maybe some dots weren’t fully connected. Maybe the watch lists need to be updated now. But only crazy people believe the new president is secretly with the terrorists.

I promise.

Let me say this as plainly as possible: The paranoia is nutty on all sides, and it’s never been more loudly broadcast as now.

Every day, we learn something new about the kinds of people who wish to harm us. We learn they are tied increasingly to the hardscrabble land of Yemen. We learn they were too good in high-school chemistry. We learn, in the case of alleged Nigerian underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, he’s the kind of guy whose match.com profile never gets any hits.

Lonely? Angry? Religious zealot? Next!

But we’re getting no useful guidance from all these supposed counter-terror experts. They’re the ones who are supposed to guide us here.

And they’re all so smothered in silly political loyalties, they’re forgetting the part where they actually say something smart. If this is the best we have, al-Qaida is overestimating us for sure.

All they have to do is wait around. We’ll collapse into more muddle-
headed thinking, Republicans and Democrats alike.

We’ll pass new rules for air travel that won’t stop a single terrorist. We’ll thrust the nation into abject fear for all the wrong reasons. From each new close call, we’ll learn nothing from any of this at all.

We’ll let more PETN float around.

In with a bang, out with a whimper. It was an anticlimactic end to Rudy Giuliani’s political career.

The steel-jawed hero of 9/11. The exhausted second-term mayor, revived by the terror attacks. The perfect politician for the Anxiety Age.

So what became of all that promise? How did he manage this power, this platform and this opportunity?

Well, here are the high points of Giuliani’s post-9/11 resume:

Made lots of money as a motivational speaker and security consultant.

Touted Bernie Kerik for Homeland Security chief.

Ran or threatened to run for president, governor and senator, approaching each race as presumptive front-runner, bowing out of each of them long before Election Day.

Yesterday, he said he’s too busy to run for anything any time soon.

“I have some very significant commitments for next year that would make it impossible for me to really run full-time for an office,” he said at a Manhattan news conference, endorsing former Republican Rep. Rick Lazio in the governor’s race. “It would be hard running from Brazil.”

The former mayor ticked off several other countries where Giuliani Partners has lucrative business engagements in the months to come. He hoped to juggle, he said, but concluded he couldn’t. A choice had to be made.

And why is he choosing Rome and Rio over Albany or Washington? In his heart of hearts, what makes Rudy not run?

Smart political people had many theories yesterday: That he’d grown accustomed to fat private-sector compensation. That beneath the bravado, he harbors secret electability doubts. That the stink of Bernie’s misdeeds still linger. That some fresh personal scandal threatens to break.

All those scenarios are plausible. None is provable. And outsiders rarely manage to climb inside Rudy’s head.

But as Rudy Giuliani steps away from the long campaign limelight, this much is certainly true: He’ll always be America’s 9/11 mayor. But the glow that once shone on him has faded now. And that fading has been most precipitous in New York.

The terror attacks will always be with us. But the mayor whose trajectory they most lifted is now solidly back on earth.