ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Jill Davis, a child life specialist with Carilion Clinic, moved to Roanoke from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Jill Davis will watch the Super Bowl at home in Roanoke tonight, looking for New Orleans Saints players she worked with at her old job.

Cathi Guirreri will be stationed in front of the TV with her two children in Montgomery County, knowing her family in Louisiana is throwing a major party.

Lee Brown will watch the game from the comfort of his apartment at Warm Hearth Village in Blacksburg, more than 800 miles removed from the Louisiana Superdome, where he used to watch Saints teams that were so bad they were dubbed the "Ain'ts."

Even though these three former Louisianans have never met, they share a common bond. They all evacuated their homes when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005 and they all wound up here in the Roanoke and New River valleys. Today, each will be rooting hard for the New Orleans Saints to beat the Indianapolis Colts.

Win or lose, the Saints' first appearance in the Super Bowl is seen as a huge boost to a region still rebuilding from the devastation Katrina wrought.

"This is much more than football," Guirreri said, thinking of the friends and family she left behind. "It'll be a big uplift to so many people."

Longing for home

Guirreri came to Virginia just a few weeks after the storm drove her from her home in Slidell, La. The storm surge of Lake Pontchartrain wrecked her house, as did the heavy winds. She rode out the hurricane in a hotel in Vicksburg, Miss., that had no power or water. A family friend, Jim Ruple, was living in Montgomery County at the time and he drove to Memphis to pick up Guirreri and her two children, Dustin and Savannah.

Ruple has since moved back to Louisiana, but Guirreri remained in Elliston while her children attended Eastern Montgomery High School. The family is sports-crazy -- Dustin, now 21, played football for the Mustangs and Savannah was the only girl to play for her junior varsity football team two years ago. Now a junior, Savannah plays volleyball, softball and competes in track and field.

Cathi Guirreri, 41, is ready to move back to Louisiana -- her mother and sister live in Lafayette -- but Savannah wants to graduate here first. Guirreri, a self-employed hair stylist, wistfully recounts how much she misses the seafood, king cake and Mardi Gras parades.

Watching the Saints roll through the playoffs into the Super Bowl only amplified her longing for home.

"I've cried watching every game," she said. "It's emotional."

Job led her to Roanoke

Jill Davis met several Saints players in her job as a child life specialist at the New Orleans Children's Hospital. Guys such as running back Deuce McAllister, placekicker John Carney and special teams star Steve Gleason regularly performed community work at the hospital, such as visiting sick children, signing autographs, and posing for pictures to raise the spirits of the hospital's young patients.

Most of the players she worked with have either retired or no longer play for the Saints.

"Certain players called all the time, because they knew the children looked up to them," Davis said. "Steve did his best to come on his own time to see patients, which was really nice. I still have a picture of him with a little boy who later died of cancer."

Davis, 30, who was Jill Hamilton at the time, lived in uptown New Orleans when the hurricane made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005. She had gone out on the town the night before with friends, thinking that this was just another hurricane, like others she had endured while growing up in Mississippi.

"You heard about hurricanes all the time and didn't think much about it," she said. "We enjoyed the city the night before the storm, then the next morning my friend's dad said 'You've got to evacuate.' "

She stayed with friends in Alexandria, La., in the central part of the state. Then, a few days after the storm, she returned to New Orleans to see the devastation firsthand with her father.

"It looked like a war zone," she said. "Telephone poles were down, body bags were left by the interstate. The smell of garbage and the stench of the city were unbearable."

The duplex where she lived was a mess. The Children's Hospital, where physicians and nurses stayed behind with patients and eventually evacuated them, closed for more than a month, which resulted in Davis losing her job.

She immediately began job hunting and found a position with similar duties in Roanoke with Carilion Clinic. She moved here in November 2005 and has put down some roots. She works with seriously ill children on a daily basis, helping them and their families cope with stress. Last year, she married Ben Davis, a doctor at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

She and her husband will watch the Super Bowl at home. They will dine on New Orleans king cake and gumbo that has been in the freezer since her mother visited a few months ago, giving Davis a little taste of the city she left behind.

Not just a game

Before the storm hit, Lee Brown, 96, lived in the posh Old Metairie section of Jefferson Parish just northwest of New Orleans. He had season tickets for the Saints, whose games attracted large crowds even when the team was bad in the 1970s, mainly because games were another reason to party.

"I used to sit there and watch them lose," Brown said. "The stands were full all the time."

Those were the days when the Saints' quarterback was the famed Archie Manning. Now, Manning's son, Peyton, quarterbacks the Colts, the Saints' Super Bowl opponent. Despite the Saints' success this season, Brown still can't shake the memory of them as perennial losers.

"I hope they win, but I doubt they will," he said.

Brown's house took on 5 ¹₂ feet of water after the storm. He sold his home for the price of the land it sat on and later learned that the house was demolished. He and his wife, Annette, moved to Blacksburg, where the couple's son, Ezra "Bud" Brown, is an alumni distinguished professor of mathematics at Virginia Tech.

Annette died more than a year ago. Brown stays busy by volunteering for community groups and nonprofits around Blacksburg.

Most of the dozens of families who relocated to Southwest Virginia for help shortly after Katrina hit have since returned home or moved elsewhere.

Guirreri hopes to move back to Louisiana one day. For now, she will root hard for the team she left behind.

"A friend sent me a piece of driftwood with the Saints' logo fire blasted into the wood," she said. "It's really cool. Everybody I talk to down there says all the towns are painted in black and gold.

"You hear people say, 'It's been five years, get over it.' But it's hard. I lost my house and my car. Everybody I know had a pine tree through the middle of their house. So many people have never been able to go home. So, it's like I said. This is definitely more than just football."