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Sports

Brave New Orleans Saints Fan Uses Belly, Towel To Guide Field Goal Attempt, Fails

Every fan contributes in his or her own way. For one brave Saints fan, that meant offering up his large pale tummy as a field-goal target.

The fact of it is, there is only so much we can do to change the outcome of a football game unless we are playing in that game. We can yell, but everyone is yelling, and everyone on the field is used to being around people yelling. We can hold up a sign with a pun or some bummy-ass acronym—e.g. "NBC: Notoriously Bloviative Collinsowrth" or whatever—on it, but we will not be alone in that, either. Most people just drink. They drink and they watch, and they drink. In New Orleans, where Sunday Night Football pitted the Saints against the Dallas Cowboys, you can generally add at least one "and they drink" to the equation. It's a folkway, and also the Saints were 0-3 entering Sunday night's game.

But as the clock ticked down in regulation, there was a chance to change all that. Drew Brees led an effortlessly Brees-ian drive down the field after the Cowboys tied the game at 20, and set up a 30-yard Zach Hocker field goal attempt for the win. He shtoinked it off the uprights, which will wind up as a footnote because the Saints wound up winning on an 80-yard touchdown pass from Brees to C.J. Spiller in overtime. The miss would have been forgotten, but for one man's heroism.

— Danny (@recordsANDradio)October 5, 2015

We may never know what made this Saints fan raise his shirt and expose his substantial and furiously pale belly as a beacon for Hocker's kick. It is for only this one brave fan to know why he chose to use his complimentary The NFL Sincerely Cares About Breast Cancer For This One Month, We Seriously Do towel to assail that proud belly as Hocker's kick sailed towards its date with the uprights. These are mysteries, and will likely be lost—invisible in the box score, forgotten by those who did not watch closely, vanished like tears in rain.

So let this stupid blog post be a testament, then. This man's belly was there that Sunday night. This man tried to change the outcome of the game, with nothing more than the gut that the good lord and the extremely heavy and high-calorie New Orleans diet gave him. He failed, but he tried. Remember him. Remember this. Remember that each of us, everywhere and always, can try to make whatever small difference we can.