It’s at the wrong Dome, but at least Darleen and Raphael Simon survived to see their football team play. They have been New Orleans Saints season ticket holders for 27 years, but the Simons are watching this game not from their usual seats in the Louisiana Superdome—21 and 22 of row 17, section 633—but rather from folding chairs set up around a television at a building adjacent to a similar arena in Houston, Texas. Along with as many as 27,000 other New Orleans residents evacuated from their flooded city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Simons have been living for the last ten days in one of the three massive shelters set up in and beside the Houston Astrodome. In the hall where evacuees have been lining up all week to register for food stamps, child support services, and FEMA assistance, about 20 New Orleans residents have gathered to watch their home team play the Carolina Panthers on television.

            A man walks by and stops briefly to check on the score. Like so many of the evacuees, he is wearing a Destiny’s Child Fan Club T-shirt, one of apparently thousands someone donated to be passed out to New Orleans refugees who arrived in Houston with only what they could carry in garbage sacks. He finds that the Saints are ahead, which, given the circumstances, seems almost too scripted to be possible.

            “They’ll find a way to lay down,” says Raphael to the crowd at large. “They always do.” His pessimism isn’t surprising. The Saints have always been terrible. Since their inception in 1966, the “Aint’s” have lost 60 percent of their contests and have won only a single playoff game. In the ’80s the team was so bad that fans showed up to games with paper bags over their heads to hide their identities. They are a fitting symbol for a city whose corrupt officials many evacuees feel left them alone and unprotected in the face of one of history’s worst storms.

            Raphael has just arrived from the U.S. post office that was set up in the abandoned box office of the Houston Astrodome. Once billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Astrodome had lain vacant for five years until it was commissioned to shelter Katrina evacuees. Now instead of millionaire athletes, its tiers of faded orange seats ring a different sort of spectacle: row upon row of cots, hundreds of cots, each cluttered with rumpled bedding and donated clothing. Instead of batting line-ups, the scoreboard flashes Red Cross and FEMA hotlines.

            “He’s never on the Saints’ side,” says Darleen, smiling. She is more confident than her husband about the team’s prospects. “I think they’ll win it for us,” she says to Milton Martin, who is sitting next to her in a wheelchair. “They do keep you on the edge of your seat, though.”

            As if Darleen’s pronouncement about the Saints’ suspenseful tendencies were prophecy, the team suddenly allows a touchdown on a spectacular pass play, but just as quickly receives a reprieve when the score is negated by a penalty. The New Orleans team is getting the lucky breaks the city could have used when the Katrina came barreling down.

            Darleen is buoyed by the sort of optimism that leads her to describe how beautiful the stars were the night after the storm, a night she and her husband spent floating on a queen sized inflatable mattress, clinging to the roof of their garage in the dark, powerless city. When the flood rose to the second floor of their house, they retreated to the attic, but when the waters threatened to rise even that far, they stuffed the mattress out a window and climbed aboard it with only their wallets, cell phones and a few changes of clothing. She tells Martin how the appliances in her kitchen began to float in the floodwaters; how the stove came unmoored and how she could smell the gas as it bubbled up through the water.