BATON ROUGE, La. -- The military helicopters that filled the skies over the LSU campus like a swarm of science-fiction sized Louisiana mosquitoes are gone.

The ambulances that wailed shrill sirens, racing to the basketball arena, are silent.

National Guardsmen, sternly and stoically holding their automatic weapons, guarding the athletic department building like it was The White House, have vacated.

Just more than three weeks after Hurricane Katrina sliced through southeast Louisiana and into Mississippi, causing probably the greatest natural disaster in United States history, the daily rhythm of a college campus is slowly returning.

But the one thing missing, the heartbeat that has driven this city and this region since the late 1950s, has been LSU football on Saturday nights in the fall in Tiger Stadium.

Katrina caused the first two LSU home games on Sept. 3 and 10 to be rescheduled and relocated, respectively. Now another hurricane, Rita, delayed Saturday's scheduled game between the No. 3 Tigers and No. 10 Tennessee until tonight.

Yet, considering the events of this month, LSU is desperate to play, as the saying goes, come hell or high water, which probably should be adopted as the state motto.

"Amid the chaos, there's one thing that you can count on in the fall down here, and that's LSU football," LSU senior center Rudy Niswanger said. "The people of this city and this state have been waiting for something that they can count on, something that reminds them of good times.

"They are longing for that few hours of normalcy. As players, so are we."

Goal line stand

In the three to four days after Katrina came ashore about sunrise on Aug. 29, especially when the levees of New Orleans broke the following day, Baton Rouge became the center for the sick and the fleeing.

Right in the middle of it were the LSU athletic facilities, such as the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, the Carl Maddox Fieldhouse, the Bernie Moore Track Stadium and Alex Box Stadium.

The P-MAC became possibly the largest triage center in American history, treating 30,000 sick and injured. The fieldhouse became a 500-bed hospital.

The track infield was a helipad to drop critical patients. The large Chinook helicopters shook windows of the athletic building, wind from the rotors bending nearby oak trees like twigs, blowing all the sand out of the long- and triple-jump pits and the gravel out of the shot put and discus area.

The baseball stadium was a drop-off point for evacuees, who were then bused to the Baton Rouge River Center.

"For the first 72 hours, when we didn't have federal or state help, LSU ran the show," LSU athletic director Skip Bertman said. "Everything was done by local doctors, LSU student-athletes, LSU students, faculty and staff. I've never been so proud to be at LSU."

Without prompting, athletes from every sport dove in among the 3,000 student volunteers, from football players like Niswanger, to basketball stars like Glen "Big Baby" Davis to the women's gymnastics team.

It was a mental, physical and emotional grind that no one will ever forget. Davis, for example, worked eight hours that first night in the triage center, toiling on the same floor where he has made himself a pro prospect.

"Glen Davis was holding three IVs at once, standing next to a doctor performing a tracheotomy," LSU basketball coach John Brady said. "At the end of the day, Glen went back to his dorm, broke down emotionally and started crying over what he just went through. (Assistant) Butch Pierre had to go over there, and console him, just to tell him it was going to be OK.

"I talked with our team, and they understand now about what's important in life. It's not a big deal now if a coach yells at them, or if they don't get enough playing time or shots, or if a ref makes a poor call. In the reality of it all, who cares about that stuff?"

The Katrina aftermath was probably tougher on the football team. Just days away from playing its home opener against North Texas, in what was to be the debut of new coach Les Miles, the team was absolutely torn.

Thirty-seven players from the affected areas in New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama. Many of their families fled to Baton Rouge to stay in the apartments of their football-playing sons.

"For 10 days, I had 20 people in my two-bedroom apartment," said Skyler Green, a senior wide receiver from Westwego, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. "It got to a point where just going to practice is a big relief. You get a break from everything that is stressing you out."

It would have been easy and understandable for the football team to have tunnel vision, particularly with the start of the season sitting in its lap. They could have lived the typical sheltered, structured, scheduled to-the-minute life of a major college player.

But they didn't want it that way. And to his credit, Miles, who came to LSU from Oklahoma State in January, replacing Nick Saban who went to the NFL's Miami Dolphins, didn't either.

It takes some players their entire career to personally connect with head coach, and some never do. In the last few weeks, though, every LSU player found out what Miles was all about.

He gave his team time to grieve and volunteer in several ways, from organizing a clothes and food drive, to visiting the evacuees at the River Center.

"The only reference I had to deal with was the 9/11 tragedy sustained by the entire country," Miles said. "This is a very regional loss, with many of our kids not knowing for a couple of days where their parents were.

"As a coach, you're always taught and you teach your team to eliminate distractions, to focus and work beyond the problems. But this was real-life drama, and it still is. If you don't give your team time to deal with these extraordinarily difficult issues, then you lose touch with what's really going with your team."

More than one Tiger player was touched by Miles, the human being, not Miles the coach.

Defensive tackle Claude Wroten called Miles "the father figure we needed to comfort a lot of us." Bertman said that the compassion Miles showed "reaffirmed the good person he is, which is what everyone told me in the interview process of hiring him."

Once Miles turned his players loose in the community, they experienced things that will stick with them forever, such as their visit to the River Center just two miles from the LSU practice fields and Tiger Stadium.

Taking it day-to-day

As Government Street goes down a hill, winds around a right corner and changes into River Road, real life smashes you with an uppercut.

Katrina evacuees stand in lines at a FEMA state distribution recovery center and at a U.S. post office on wheels. Many, though, simply sit on the curbs in the hot sun, with tired, hollow faces hoping to catch a breeze off the Mississippi River.

This is what Alan Freeman now sees every day coming to work.

Freeman, who had been the general manager of The Pyramid in Memphis, took a job in July as GM of the River Center in Baton Rouge. His job was to resuscitate an arena that opened in 1977, but with each passing decade, lost business. It's an arena that Freeman calls "the Mid-South Coliseum of Baton Rouge."

But since Katrina hit shore, Freeman has been the unofficial mayor of a small town of evacuees who have filled his building to the max.

Peek through the doors into the main arena, and there are wall-to-wall cots and suffering humanity as far as the eye can see.

"This is almost like a low-security prison," Freeman said. "Most of these people got here by buses. They really can't go anywhere because they have no transportation."

Freeman and staff members, such as Randy Philipson, director of event services, say they can't escape the daily sights in the arena.

"When you walk through there in the middle of the afternoon, people are just sitting there and crying," Philipson said.

"A lot of them are hoping they can move on as they get a check from FEMA. But when you've got people like a single mother in there with six kids, she doesn't have the funds to get out."

Many of the evacuees are trying to hold on to their last shred of pride, which is why the media has been kept out of the main living areas. Visits by a string of celebrities, such John Travolta and Will Smith, were allowed. But those tailed off, and even that got tiring.

"Some celebrities are sincere, but you wonder if some came through here for their own publicity," Philipson said. "One day when a celebrity was walking through, an evacuee yelled, 'We are not monkeys in a cage.' "

Then there was the case a couple of weeks ago when the New Orleans Saints played their season opener at Carolina. Fox Sports put a couple of big screen TVs in the River Center so evacuees could watch the game. The network brought a TV crew to get crowd reaction to use as cut-ins on the telecast.

"But nobody was paying attention to the game," Philipson said. "Fox told us, 'Tell them (the evacuees) they're going to be on national TV.' These poor people don't care about being on national TV. Fox was disappointed.

"But you know what? Tough. Priorities, please."

Among the welcomed visitors were the group of 15 LSU football players, led by defensive tackle Kyle Williams and Niswanger, a couple of 290-pound plus tree trunks who had their hearts torn to pieces from what they saw.

"There were so many little kids walking around not knowing where their parents were," Williams said. "And there were so many parents who didn't know where their kids were."

Niswanger said he'll never forget being greeted by a Red Cross volunteer, who was overjoyed that the LSU players had stopped in for a visit.

"I was thinking that she was thanking me for visiting for maybe 90 minutes," Niswanger said, "and she and people like her were going to be here for 15 to 20 hours for the next three to four weeks, or more.

"It made me think how thankful I am for people like her. It impressed on me the love of humanity for a tragedy that I didn't know was there. I'd never seen it before."

Freeman and his taxed staff have lived it daily, especially in the first week after Katrina when they worked 12-hour shifts around the clock.

"The first few days were extremely hard," Freeman said. "The horror stories you heard about FEMA were the same here. And for all the good the Red Cross does, the first 10 days here after Katrina, they had four different people in charge. Whoever was in charge would just disappear, and someone else would show up."

Before the Red Cross established a phone number at the River Center, Freeman's staff had to answer calls from frantic people hoping to find their relocated family or friends.

"The hardest part of all was telling somebody in tears on the phone that 'I don't have your loved one here,' " Philipson said. "That was brutal."

At its peak, the River Center held 6,700 evacuees, with about a total of just more than 10,000 to date. Freeman, figuring restroom and shower usage, that his building would be stretched if it housed more than 1,500 people.

Some evacuees have moved on, finding families and friends as a viable option.

But as of the weekend, there were still 1,000 evacuees and military personnel in the River Center. Freeman said he expected the possible arrival of a couple more hundred evacuees from shelters in southwest Louisiana who now have to escape Hurricane Rita.

The building also continues to be a main distribution center for food, clothing and other basic necessities of life. Also, Freeman said a food service working out of the arena's kitchen facilities is shipping out 20,000 meals three times daily.

"We have kids being bused off to school, we have a nursery school and we have religious services on Sunday," Freeman said. "Our concern is, though, whenever somebody makes the decision that this place is going to close down, what happens to the families who don't have any money? Where will they go?

"Still, right now, it's better than it was the first week, but ..."

"It still feels like The Twilight Zone," Philipson said.

Play ball

For awhile, as LSU prepared for its Sept. 10 game against Arizona State that was moved from Baton Rouge to ASU's home field in Tempe, practice each day was a chore.

The roar of the medical helicopters landing and taking off "was so loud, you couldn't even hear some of the plays being called," said LSU cornerback Mario Stevenson of Memphis Melrose High School.

Players who weren't involved in drills or plays stood mesmerized, while others more involved found it hard to concentrate.

"You see the helicopters flying over, you know what's in them, and you what's going on," Niswanger said. "It brings up all sorts of emotions."

For the players from the affected areas, it was even worse. The evacuation stories never stopped coming, like the one Green told about a former high school foe he came across in the parking lot of his apartment complex.

"He told me he and this other guy had water up to their necks, and they were hoisting this elderly lady into a boat," Green said. "A group of looters came toward them and asked 'What do y'all have?' They just shot the guy who was helping my friend in the head and moved on."

With those images weighing on the Tigers, it's a miracle they trailed just 17-7 after three quarters at Arizona State. But in an amazing span of 80 seconds at the start of the final period, LSU blocked a field goal, then a punt, and returned both for touchdowns.

In the end, a fourth-down scrambling 39-yard JaMarcus Russell touchdown pass and one last defensive stand sealed a 35-31 victory.

"When we blocked those kicks, I was thinking God gave it to us for a reason," Russell said. "He brought us this far and He wouldn't let us down now. My last touchdown pass was nothing but Him."

The glow of that victory two weeks ago, followed by an open date, has waned. Back to the grind of real life, it's a struggle beyond the borders of the LSU campus. Traffic crawls. Restaurants are packed until late at night. Checkout lines in grocery stores and Wal-Marts that usually took five minutes pre-Katrina now stretch to 30 minutes.

There are still many more questions than answers in a city that has doubled its population of 350,000 to 700,000, or as Bertman said, "Thirty years of growth in seven days."

But, if just for a few hours, all the stress and sorrow will be forgotten, especially 12 minutes before the kickoff of Monday's game.

That's when an LSU drum major will march on the field, raise his hand, and the Golden Band from Tigerland will sound the familiar first pregame notes:

"Dah dah daaaaaaaaah, dah."

And through the tears, Louisiana natives in the stadium, watching on TV or listening on the radio, will smile.

Because they know that after the storm, there's always the purple, gold and white rainbow at the end called LSU football.

What do you think those stripes on the Tigers' helmets all these years have really been, anyway?