The air was hot, heavy and stifling, overpowering the senses with the stench of perspiration, backed-up sewage, and festering mildew and mold.
It took nearly four days to evacuate more than 30,000 people who took refuge at the stadium. They spent three-plus days in increasingly squalid, dank conditions after plumbing and power systems failed.
"I've got a lot of connections here. I've got people here that I know and love, and that was our goal, is to come out, man, and provide joy for those people — and that's exactly what we did.
The handful of current Saints who were on the team in 2006 — Brees, right guard Jahri Evans, right tackle Zach Strief and safety Roman Harper — don't anticipate an atmosphere as electric and cathartic as a decade ago.
"Usually in a game like that, the attention and focus and importance in that building is on the field — and it wasn't that night," Strief said. "The people in there that night were a bigger deal."
Thornton noticed he was standing near the same section he and his staff had scurried people out of when the roof tore open above it during Katrina.
"So many of those people, right when it happens to you,Wholesale Jerseys, just can't fathom ever being able to come back from that," Brees said.
Still, they expect this Monday night to be special in its own way.
The Saints played their home preseason games in Jackson, Mississippi, and Shreveport, Louisiana. They opened the 2006 regular season with two road games, winning both, further fueling excitement about the dome's reopening.
"We wanted to play hard. We wanted to play tough," Evans said. "We wanted to give the fans something to be proud of."
Rock bands U2 and Green Day, eager to celebrate the rebirth of a city with a renowned musical history, joined to sing "The Saints Are Coming " in a Super Bowl-like production before the game.
Its expansive white roof was torn up, exposing evacuees inside to falling debris and water pouring in — all while rising water in surrounding streets turned the stadium's elevated public plaza into an island of desperation.
Doug Thornton, a New Orleans-based executive for SMG, which manages the Superdome, was in the stadium until those stranded were evacuated by bus or helicopter.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Drew Brees hopes the world watches what happens in and around the Superdome on Monday night.
Then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue informed Thornton that the league wanted the stadium restored enough for football by the 2006 season, which would require crews working long hours, six to seven days a week.
"Then I looked back over my shoulder and saw the dome in the background and could see the water glistening for miles," Thornton said. "I saw that roof ripped apart and I knew what I'd left behind and I couldn't imagine that we could ever recover."
Yet his punt block cemented his place in New Orleans lore. He was popular before Katrina because of how he embraced New Orleans. He was dating a local woman who he would ultimately marry. And as he sat at his locker after the game, he said the play gave him "infinite joy."
Evans said the Saints were moved by the video and the hardship they'd witnessed around town.
Strief was not in uniform that night, but was on the sideline.
Thornton recalled feeling "helpless and so sorrowful" as he left the dome and boarded a helicopter, which flew over his own devastated neighborhood near the breached 17th Street Canal.
Gleason,NFL Jerseys Cheap, who retired in 2008, was diagnosed several years later with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease,Cheap China Jerseys, which causes paralysis. Now he uses a wheelchair and is perhaps known more globally for his activism on behalf of those stricken with neuromuscular diseases than he was for football.
Brees figures coverage of the game will resonate with people he met this summer from flood-ravaged areas of West Virginia, when the Saints held training camp there — or with Louisiana residents whose communities around Baton Rouge were inundated last month.
Brees and Strief said they remember the sound of the blocked punt — the ball squarely hitting Gleason's hand. Brees compared it to a "shotgun blast," followed the crowd roaring so loud, Strief said, that "you could feel physically the energy and the noise."
As the Saints host the Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans will mark the 10-year anniversary of the reopening of the hulking, 73,000-seat stadium on Sept. 25, 2006, following its unprecedented 10-month restoration from extensive damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.
"Forget sports for a while. There's a period of time where just life as New Orl