NEW ORLEANS — Have you ever seen a city dance?I have. I’m standing on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville. It’s the day of the first black-and-gold Super Bowl, and I’m watching the crowds go wild.It boggles the senses, standing here. It’s like being submerged in a black-and-gold ocean, immersed in sounds and smells and feelings that are dizzying and moving and wonderful.It smells like smoke and beer and spice and happiness. It’s a cold day in hell — and a chilly day in New Orleans. There’s a wide open blue sky above us, and the clouds roll overhead like the floats parading down the old brick streets.  You can hear the bands marching down Canal Street. This isn’t sophisticated, subtle music. This isn’t the kind of music you politely bob your head to or tap your feet to. This is loud, proud, raw and wild like rolling thunder — music you feel in your bones and in your blood. You can hear it for blocks, and the blood in your veins pumps a little faster as you hear the thundering drums and the roaring brass.There’s music everywhere, on every corner of every street. There’s music in the bars and restaurants — music in the streets and on the sidewalks. There are all kinds of songs being sung in all kinds of styles and keys, but they’re all up-beat, they’re all jubilant, and they’re all meant for dancing.And there’s plenty of dancing going on. From one end of the city to the other, there’s always a beat. And where there isn’t, some black-and-gold-clad zealot leaps up and yells, and the whole seething crowd erupts in answer.”Who Dat? Who Dat? Who Dat say ‘dey gonna beat them Saints?”It’s overwhelming, and for a second I have to draw back into myself.I’m not from New Orleans.I mean I’ve never actually lived in New Orleans. I’ve always lived 80 miles out, in Baton Rouge.But New Orleans has always been a part of me, as much a part of my bloodline as my blonde hair and blue eyes and my tendency to like good music. My mother was born and raised here, and, as Chris Rose famously wrote, “She is a New Orleans Girl, and New Orleans girls never live anywhere else. And even if they do, they always come back.”She thinks she’s past it. She thinks we generally can’t tell. But when she gets together with her friends from the old town, and when she returns to the city streets she walked as a girl and still knows by heart, her accent lapses into that distinctive accent you can only find in New Orleans. Her voice fills with “y’ats” and “y’alls” and nostalgia — it’s wonderful to watch.She grew up in the Ninth Ward, in a tiny brick house on Foch Road. Her mother and father labored to raise four children in that house on a government salary. It flooded during Hurricane Camille — my mother remembers fleeing to a gymnasium as the streets filled with water and the wind hurled shrapnel through the air. On the year of my grandparents’ 50th anniversary, the house flooded to the ceiling in Katrina. They were too old to rebuild it, so we gutted it.I remember going to the house and shoveling out all their possessions, unceremoniously dumping old books and pictures and memories in the giant pile of sheetrock and wood and garbage by the roadside. I remember my old, dignified grandfather digging among the rubble like a vagrant, searching for memories among the ruins.I remember driving down those ghostly streets, looking at the eerie piles of indiscriminate garbage that contained all their own dead, broken muddy memories.They live in Baton Rouge now. But whenever they talk of home, and their eyes cloud with memory, it’s obvious their minds and hearts are always in New Orleans. I can’t help but think my grandmother still dreams of the tiny white kitchen where she spent so much time, money and love.But this isn’t just a story of me and my mother and grandparents. It’s the story of thousands of children, of thousands of mothers and fathers and grandparents, and, how if they ever left, they’re all here again, dancing in the streets of the city they’ll always call home.This isn’t just another team. This isn’t just another Super Bowl. Win or lose, this is a day of jubilation for a people that have struggled to rebuild their homes despite the floods, despite the corruption, despite the heat, despite all the things that would make children of a lesser city pack up and leave.The deadline for this column is at halftime. I don’t know if the Saints are going to win this game. I don’t know how this story is going to end.But I watch these men and women who have been through so much, endured so many hardships and so many trials — and I can’t help but think the ending probably doesn’t matter. I look at these people dancing with reckless, happy abandon under a bright Louisiana sky, and I can’t help but think that somewhere in heaven there’s a big, happy, smiling God dancing with them.Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe I’m being melodramatic.But I look down these streets that were once lined with great grey piles of broken memories, and I see them now lined with black and gold. I look down these streets that were once empty and silent and mud-caked, and I see these dancing, cheering people that were once exiled and homeless and broken, and, well, I very much doubt it.Happy Super Bowl, New Orleans. Laissez les bon temps roulez.You deserve it.Matthew Albright is a 21-year-old mass communication junior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_malbright.—-Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]