The caller from the Gulf Coast stared Hurricane Isaac in the eye and refused to blink, bracing himself for an unsettling day ahead.

"It's raining pretty hard, and it's blowing pretty fierce," Deuce McAllister said late Tuesday night as he hunkered down inside a Gulfport, Miss., hotel lobby. "It's a big storm. But believe me, I've seen worse."

For a second or two, McAllister and I allowed ourselves an ironic chuckle at the absurdity of his understatement. Seven years ago, when he was a star running back for the Saints and I was a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, we spent two days in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina touring evacuation shelters in Mississippi and bearing vivid and surreal witness to the flooded devastation of New Orleans.

That was how we met – experiencing the worst natural disaster in U.S. history with up-close-and-personal clarity – and in the years since neither of us has come close to forgetting the destruction, displacement and emotion we encountered amid the wreckage. It takes only a few, sentence-fragment-length prompts to stir the memories: The shell-shocked survivors squatting irrationally in otherwise abandoned high-rises above the floodwaters; the evacuee-laced airport scene McAllister likened to "Hotel Rwanda"; the large truck on the interstate speeding toward downtown New Orleans loaded up with coffins.

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Those images came rushing back Monday as I considered the notion that McAllister, and the region he loves, may once again be confronted with a hellacious hurricane. He did his best to downplay the situation, saying, "There are a lot of 'essential personnel' at this hotel, and if it's safe enough for them, I think it's safe enough for me."

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Yet even as McAllister hoped for the best, noting news reports late Tuesday that the storm had stalled and was not likely to approach the force of its infamous predecessor, the Saints' all-time rushing leader braced for the worst, recalling that the early optimism in Katrina's wake turned out to be nature's equivalent of a trick play.

"It blew over," McAllister recalled. "That's what was reported early on. That's what they felt like – that it was a bad rainstorm and New Orleans had been spared. But it wasn't the hurricane; it was all the flooding that followed. This storm is not as big as Katrina, but it has the potential to be just as bad."

That Isaac is hitting the Gulf Coast almost exactly seven years to the day makes the Katrina connection impossible to ignore. "I try not to think about it," McAllister said, "but it's spooky in and of itself, just because of the timeline."

Are we better off today than we were seven years ago? Again, there is hope, on multiple fronts.

During a 2006 tour of the Crescent City's levees and canals, a pair of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials showed me the post-Katrina improvements that had been initiated and explained why they felt the deadly post-Katrina overflows and breaches were not likely to be repeated.

McAllister has had similar experiences. "I've been out there," he said. "I've seen some of the equipment. They can pump out half an inch of water every 30 minutes, which is good. But what if you're getting two inches of rain an hour? Will those systems fail? I think it's yet to be determined, but I don't ever think they've done enough."

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