Last night's Monday Night Football game that left thousands in traffic early this morning provided a good excuse to leave work early yesterday, but a better one to come in late today, if at all.

Jim Henderson

Saints'  fans are nursing a hangover this Tuesday of Fat Tuesday proportions.  And it's a doozy.

When I hear them elect to rank last night's defeat with the most disappointing in team history, I recognize that they had no shortage of candidates from which to choose.

When you give the football away four times and take it away none, you deserve to lose.  Usually when you surrender a touchdown in the kicking game as the Saints did on a blocked field goal, you deserve to lose.

Unless you supply a pair of touchdowns in the kicking game yourself as Reggie Bush did.  Then -- maybe  -- you can put yourself in a position to win whether you deserved to or not as the Saints did in the final two and a half minutes of last night's game.

The situation: 27-27.  2:13 left. Saints' ball at the Viking 29.

But then a combination of misalignments and missed assignments along with the continuing vote of "no confidence" in the running game provided disastrous results.

A time out that had to be utilized because of Robert Meachem lining up erroneously.  A pass incompletion and another incompletion conspired to set the stage for yet another two-minute tragedy on the Superdome stage after the Saints took just nine seconds off the clock.

It left Martin Grammatica too far away apparently from kicking a game-winning field goal, though given his recent failures we'll never know how close would have been close enough.

It left too much time on the clock.  It left too many timeouts at the Vikings' disposal.  And it left them too close to makeable field goal range themselves.

It was like reading the same book you've read countless times before.  You didn't need to skip to the final page to know the ending.  You knew it when you turned the page to begin the final chapter.

How much blame do we ascribe to the latest "Grammatical error" -- the missed 46 yard field goal to win the game perhaps with two minutes left?  To be fair there were many more mistakes than that.   But there was none bigger.  Kickers are paid to make makeable field goals with the game on the line and in two of the three Saint defeats this season, he hasn't.

I've often thought of journeymen kickers like the old putters golfers throw in the closet when they lose their magic.  You pull out one in times of desperation.  It makes a few right away to suggest you've found the solution only to go cold shortly thereafter until you throw it back in the closet again, some other similarly desperate team picks him up and you pick up someone else's discard.

And the cycle begins anew.

Soon -- if not now -- Sean Payton will have to decide if that problem will heal itself or if an operation is needed to remove it.  But that's far from the only place the Saints and their fans are hurting today.

As the players line up in front of the surgeon's operating table, the fans line up in front of the psychiatrist's couch.

Doctor, doctor, give me the news.

I got a bad case of the "two minute blues."