NEW ORLEANS -- I just stepped in something vile.

It’s a little after 5 a.m. on Bourbon Street, and while I managed to weave my way through the overflowing trash, stray dogs, a guy snoring in a doorway with a death grip on a half-filled plastic cup labeled Huge Ass Beer, a friendly but bored stripper (I mean dancer), joggers (joggers?), the police and an out-of-tune street singer named George Hunter, I somehow missed a rather prodigious pile of puke -- or, as I think they call it here, a 'slightly used' Hurricane.

Only a hard swallow prevents me from losing my very expensive dinner of risotto and lobster with extra crabmeat (courtesy of new Washington player personnel director Vinny Cerrato). But the shoes? The shoes are a goner. Let’s see them make a Just Do It commercial out of this bit of cross-training.

And so Day Two in Super Bowl Nation comes to an ignominious end, with me bent over a fire hydrant cleaning someone’s yak off my shoes while asking aloud to a nearly empty Bourbon Street: Oh please, will the glamour and glitz of covering this event ever cease?

But hey, any lightweight doofus can chronicle the NFL Nation's biggest party. Only the brave (read: sick) few stick around to belly-flop into the gutter and cover the hangover. And if it’s true that all great cities are actually living, breathing entities, well then at 5 a.m. after a wild night of Super Bowl raving, N'awlins is in dire need of a fistful of aspirin, a long, hot shower and a half day of ZZZs.

New York may be the city that never sleeps. But from where I'm standing it looks narcoleptic compared to The Big Easy.

"This city never shuts down -- never," says my pre-dawn French Quarter tour guide, Elisa, the bored stripper -- I’m sorry, dancer. "But I think it does take a nap for about 10 minutes between 5 and 6 a.m."

Yesterday I covered the Parliament of Whores that is Super Bowl Media Day where, when I wasn’t getting headbutted by the TV camera crew from Des Moines trying to get a shot of Chris Berman, I was getting my ass kicked on interviews by little 8-year-old Emily from Nickelodeon (perhaps that explains why I felt the need to stay out so late).

And then, wouldn’t you know it? The best interview of the day turns out to be Elisa, the bored ... dancer.

I met Elisa around 5 a.m. outside a club called Cas Bah just after being fitted with my new pair of regurge galoshes. As I crossed her path, Metallica’s appropriately titled ditty Enter the Sandman was being blasted out the front door of the club she works at from 4 a.m. till noon. (And I thought my hours sucked. Elisa, the bored dancer, was shivering in her bra and stockings and leather jacket while smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk when I casually mentioned to her that, "Hey, it’s a little early for Metallica, no?"

"They’re sellouts, so who cares?"

"Yup. You gonna watch the Super Bowl?"

"Nope."

"Do you even like football?"

"At least in the NFL they are allowed to really beat the s--- out of each other, not like that fake crap pro wrestling."

Ah, me and Elisa. The bored dancer who hates football (she doesn’t seem too fond of the dentist, either) and the boring reporter -- kindred spirits.

So what does Elisa, the Kurt Warner of cigarette-butt flicking, dislike the most about pre-dawn N'awlins? Same as me: the smell. How in the world to describe it? It’s equal parts frat house basement, stale beer, horse manure, vomit, the bottom of a trash can during a heat wave and, well, have you ever smelled really sweaty hockey equipment?

The garbage is everywhere. Half-eaten pizzas, red police tape, bottles, cups, beads, shirts, cans, pants (yes, pants) -- it’s all here and overflowing out of the gutters. The trash cans are all labeled The Mayor’s Clean Team. Well, from the looks of things this team is getting pounded worse than the Patriots did in their last two Super Bowls.

The French Quarter at this time of day (or is it night?) is quite a study in contrasts. Across the street, a construction crew is hard at work clearing a demolished building, and on the next block a valet hoses down the red-brick sidewalk in front of a hotel. You can window-shop for expensive Lladro porcelain figurines, but first you have to step over the guy sleeping off his buzz in the doorway. Near Jackson Square, which looks like a zombie train station, a little girl in pigtails and a plaid school uniform walks her golden lab with her mother. Yes, there is some vegetation here, but it’s growing out of the cracks in the buildings. The Bourbon Burlesque, I noticed, shares a doorway with The Panda Bear gift shop.

Even in the dark, where the only illumination is the reflection of neon signs off the shiny wet pavement, it’s hard not to see the squalor and then, in turn, think about the gazillion-dollar budget the Super Bowl has for media meals, confetti, sequins and Barry Manilow.

As the sun comes up over the Mississippi, casting a long shadow on the ESPN set across The Quarter, I confess to Elisa that later today I am scheduled to interview Jonah, the E*Trade chimp (this trip has been one long career highlight so far.) Unless, of course, that scheming little Emily gets to him first. I’m guessing while Elisa and I are out schlepping for The Man, this privileged primate is in a suite at the Hyatt, sipping Pellegrino and complaining about the fluffiness of the bath robes.

The bored dancer snorts her disgust. "I don’t care about the Super Bowl," she says. "I mean, how much does the Super Bowl care about me?" She flicks another cigarette, I’m not kidding, 25 feet over a pile of garbage and dead center into a mud puddle -- which I half expect to burst into flames.

And then the bored dancer winks goodbye to the boring reporter. She returns to service her customers. As do I. And both of us, you can tell, are happy to be getting off Bourbon Street.

"I sure hope you get your shoes clean," she says, with a wave.

David Fleming is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at flemfile@aol.com.