• By SHELDON MICKLES
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Feb 7, 2010

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MIAMI — When the New Orleans Saints walk into Sun Life Stadium for Super Bowl XLIV tonight, many of them will no doubt think back to how they felt when they left the same stadium on the evening of Oct. 25.

Riding a wave of good karma after coming back from a 24-3 second-quarter deficit to outlast the Miami Dolphins 46-34 and remain undefeated through six games, the Saints were exactly 15 weeks away from history.

There was no way of knowing at that moment, but many of the Saints secretly had a feeling, at least they hoped, that they would be making a return trip for Super Bowl XLIV against the Indianapolis Colts.

Even though they were 6-0 at the time, several players looked back on that game as the turning point of a magical season that would see the Saints go 13-0 and eventually advance to the Super Bowl for the first time in the 43-year history of the franchise.

How they did it was what gave the Saints that certain feeling.

Trailing by 21 points just before halftime, they trimmed it to 14 on the final play of the half on a gutsy, 1-yard sneak by Drew Brees, then hammered the Dolphins in the second half — outscoring them 43-10 after trailing 24-3.

“To see the look of everyone’s eyes and the sideline, and to really know what we had on the sideline … no one was wavering in their confidence that we were going to win that game,” Brees said this week.

Like Brees, All-Pro guard Jahri Evans put the pieces together that late October evening when the buses pulled out for the airport and the happy plane ride home.

“It was kind of weird. We never really thought that we were going to lose that game,” he said. “The way we came back, it was a real good team effort with special teams, defense and the offense just putting points up. The way we started that game was horrible.”

But a couple of hours later, everything changed and Evans realized that the karma had arrived.

“I said, ‘We’ve got something special,’ ” he said. “To come back from a game like that, it was the first game, I think, that we were trailing. We were always on the up and up every game, always beating everybody and never down, and that game we were down by 21 and came back to win.”

“That game really gave us the mind-set that we can will all of our games that we play in,” said All-Pro free safety Darren Sharper, whose interception and touchdown early in the third quarter helped fuel the Saints comeback.

As a result, they used that game and their 39-14 loss to the Chicago Bears in the 2006 NFC Championship game, which led to Super Bowl XLI here, as motivation to get back to south Florida.