Eighteen hours before Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, Rita Benson LeBlanc’s home in the old Metairie section of the city had the air of a besieged bunker. Benson LeBlanc manned a cell phone to coordinate the evacuation of team players, coaches, other personnel, and their families. The plan was to fly out in a 757 the Saints had chartered from New Orleans International Airport and lie low in San Antonio until the storm had passed. Though the sky was bright and cloudless, weather forecasters howled about the coming storm. “Everywhere, everyone seemed to be in a state of panic and confusion,” recalls William Legier, founder of Legier & Materne, a Gulf Coast accounting firm. “Airports were shut down. Roads were gridlocked. The main interstate out of town was bumper to bumper: Nothing was moving. Many citizens thought only of themselves and moved on. Not Rita.”

Legier’s son Billy had booked a seat on a commercial flight to Los Angeles, where he is a real estate broker. When the flight was canceled, the elder Legier phoned Benson LeBlanc and asked if she had any spare seats on the family’s private plane. “I really expected her to say that she couldn’t help,” he recalls. Instead, she told Legier that if his son got to her house, she would guarantee his safe passage on one of her “arks.”

With Katrina about to turn the Saints’ home, the Louisiana Superdome, into a metaphor for a chaotic, ravaged city, Benson LeBlanc asked the pilot to wait for a couple of elderly stragglers. Fortunately, they soon appeared, and the plane was one of the last to take off before disaster struck. “Rita was amazing,” Legier says. “Through it all, she somehow stayed calm and decisive.”

Two years later, Benson LeBlanc is the executive vice president of the Saints. She oversees the business and administrative side of the Saints and their Arena Football League sister, the VooDoo, with the same coolheaded assurance she demonstrated during Katrina. Though the 30-year-old Benson LeBlanc is being groomed to one day take over for her 80-year-old grandfather, Tom Benson, it seems that by cleaning up the reputation of the N.F.L. team’s front office, the granddaughter is actually grooming the grandfather.

To the people of New Orleans, the story of the Saints is less hagiography than a Star Wars saga in which Benson LeBlanc plays Luke Skywalker to Tom Benson’s Darth Vader. “Rita has given the Saints a softer image,” says Anne Milling, founder of the Women of the Storm, an organization that brings members of Congress to New Orleans to see the challenges still faced after Katrina. Benson LeBlanc is one of the group’s prime movers. “She’s sincerely grateful that New Orleanians have sustained the team through many years of losing. Her grandfather may have felt that with his heart, but he never showed it.”

Before Hurricane Katrina struck, the Saints patriarch was widely seen as a ruthless opportunist. Saddled with an outmoded stadium, shrinking attendance, and the N.F.L.’s smallest media market outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, he demanded and received generous inducements from the city and state in 2001. In a kind of reverse rent, the Saints are given yearly cash subsidies to stay in the Superdome, with annual payments now at $20 million and scheduled to eventually reach $23.5 million in 2009. The team also gets to keep every dollar of revenue the stadium generates from Saints games, a perk similarly enjoyed by only one other N.F.L. franchise, the Indianapolis Colts.