Wouldn’t Dat Just Beat All?

To find this year’s Super Bowl, make a right turn at revelry, a left turn at largesse, a U-turn at Houston, and head three hours east.

Past gambling boats and crawfish boats. Past Turtle Bayou and Cow Bayou. Past a giant billboard in the shape of a 10-foot bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Drive until you can hear French in the voices, smell old oak in the air, and order hogshead cheese off the menu.

Drive until folks call you “bebe” and etouffee you with kindness.

Then you see it, sitting on the scraggly front lawn of a weathered cabin called Bayou Boudin and Cracklin, a crooked marquee that speaks not only for this tiny Cajun town, but that giant game down the road.

Da Boudins Hot

Da Beer Its Cold

Jake He’s Gone Win

Dat Super Bowl

“Whaddya think?” says Neal “Cat Man” Champagne, who concocted the ode with buddy Rocky Sonnier. “That boy is one of us. That boy is gonna bring it home.”

That boy is Carolina Panther quarterback Jake Delhomme.

For him, as for many small-town players who will fill the Reliant Stadium field, today is about more than the ring.

It’s about bringing it home.

In Delhomme’s case, that would be Breaux Bridge, the self-proclaimed Crawfish Capital of the World, a southwestern Louisiana town of 7,360 folks, a place filled with mixed aromas, occasionally fractured English, and an unshakeable sense of community.

It is a town that, nearly 150 years ago, was named quite literally for the bridge that was built over the Bayou Teche to connect the families of two brothers.

It is a town that erects those same sorts of bridges daily between the locals and those who must leave, mystical connections that remind its wanderers they are never far from family.

Delhomme, who was born here and lives here but must work elsewhere for six months a year, is one of those wanderers.

He is gone during the fall but never forgotten. And now that he is in the game of his life against the solidly favored New England Patriots, the town has reached out once more.

Cruise through tiny pocked streets with French names, roll over a bayou the color of creamed coffee, feel the strength of the grip.

First, you see lawn signs. Hundreds and hundreds of lawn signs. Each of them stuck into the ground with the same message.

We {heart} Jake

Then, you see a town cheering for Jake until it is literally black and blue.

There are Panther banners in yards, banners draped across bridges, banners in English and French and both.

There are Panther signs in store fronts, Panther-scripted bedsheets running down the side of bank windows, even Panther-colored paper cups and plates stuck smartly in a fence around St. Bernard School.

“Go Jake,” they read.

Above, the school marquee offers proof of insurance with the words, “God Bless Jake.”

It is one of a dozen marquees, in front of restaurants and bakeries and drug stores, that have shunned the daily specials to promote the local kid.

There’s a giant poster of Delhomme in the window of Le Galerie de Pont Breaux.

There’s Jammin’ Jake’s Habanero Pepper Jelly on sale outside Les Fruits de la Savanne.

Then there’s Wildie Roberts, the 71-year-old bank teller who used to greet Delhomme’s father Jerry as he walked in carrying his baby son Jake.

“I was there from the beginning,” she says.

Outside her modest brick house at the entrance to the town, she covered her Mardi Gras garland in blue crepe paper and shadowed her Mardi Gras masks with a Panther flag.

“Mardi Gras comes every year,” she says, smiling. “This thing with Jake is once in a lifetime.”

*

For 37 years, despite the size of its hype and span of its audience, the Super Bowl has pumped a small-town pulse.

It’s beamed around the world, yet best celebrated on the couch. It’s hyped beyond the stars, yet the champions are often faceless and its heroes are often neighbors.

Only a relatively few times in its 37-year history has it been about Joe Montana or John Elway. More often than not, it’s about guys with odd names from thicket-covered pasts, guys who carry the hopes not of millions of casual fans, but a few friends down the block.

Guys like dat Delhomme.

“People around here, we identify with Jake,” says Jack Dale Delhomme, the mayor and Jake’s second cousin. “Cajuns have been depicted as people with no teeth, who can’t speak English and don’t wear shoes. We all know that’s different. Jake is showing the world that it’s different.”

While refusing to change.

While other NFL players spend their off-seasons escaping home, Delhomme spent last summer moving closer to home.

He paid for a giant truck to pick up his grandfather’s house, where he lives with his wife and young daughter, and haul it a quarter of a mile to his parents’ property.

“It was an amazing thing to watch,” says Bronson Breaux, who owns a health club across the street. “We all thought the house was going to tip over and fall right there on the ground.”

But it didn’t fall, and today it stands, about a screen pass away from his parents’ house, a tiny gray cottage that is surely the most unassuming residence for a Super Bowl quarterback ever.

“I was lucky enough to be raised by two great people,” Delhomme says. “I want them to be a part of [daughter Lauren’s] life.... That is our way of life. That is what we enjoy.”

It is a story typical of a guy who married his grade-school sweetheart, attended Louisiana Lafayette just down the road, and wears No. 17 because his daughter was born to wife Keri on Dec. 17, 2002, after 17 hours of labor.

It is an act consistent with a guy who cherishes his hometown while remembering when he had nowhere else.

Jake Delhomme takes the field today as the only Super Bowl quarterback who was once a backup in NFL Europe.

Before this season, he was a Panther third-stringer who had played six games in six years with the New Orleans Saints.

He is consistently called “Jack” by reporters, his last name is often pronounced as something other than the proper Duh-lome, and before this week, few even knew how that name was translated.

“The Cajuns seem to have a suffering gene,” says Cynthia Breaux, a local restaurant owner. “But they live by the idea that you can always overcome.”

*

In any other town, the signs would read, “Go Jake.”

Here, they read, “Geaux Jake.”

In any other town, a dish named after a quarterback would be a prime rib.

Here, at the Corner Bar, “The Jake” is a hamburger smothered in jalapenos and red beans.

Outside, the marquee reads, “Wow Jake. Haslet We Told You So.”

Folks here are still smarting over the fact that Delhomme was never given a chance by Saint Coach Jim Haslett. They figured it might take a miracle for him to get a chance with the Panthers.

The way the mayor figures it, he was that miracle.

In the first game of this season, Delhomme replaced ineffective Rodney Peete in the third quarter against the Jacksonville Jaguars, with the Panthers trailing by 17 points.

“His dad called me on the phone, told me to get over to the house, that Jake was in the game,” Jack Dale Delhomme recalls. “So I ran over there and sat on the couch and cheered like crazy for the rest of the game.”

Cheered Delhomme to the greatest comeback in team history, a 24-23 victory that gave him the starting spot and began the Panthers’ unlikely road to Houston.

“Ever since then, I’ve watched every game at their house, on the corner of the beige sofa. I’m the good-luck charm,” Jack says.

But what about today, when Delhomme’s parents will be at the game?

“They gave me the keys,” Jack says.

No matter what happens today, not much will probably change for his second cousin.

Jake Delhomme recently refused to appear on a highway billboard unless the town’s other NFL player, Houston’s Domanick Davis, was pictured with him.

He recently talked about how he would continue training the horses who live in the back of the modest property now shared by him and his father.

“I just want to go back to being the same old Jake,” he says.

With that same, now perfectly appropriate last name.

“In French, Delhomme means, ‘The Man,’ ” explains the mayor. “Everybody else may just be figuring that out now. But around here, we’ve known it forever.”

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read his previous columns, go to latimes.com/plaschke.