There have been false moments of hope the past three years.

A lot of them.

Every October we get lured in after the Saints make a furious charge back only to regress into a state of sleepwalking to finish the year. Hope is cheap. It’s dangerous. But after watching three preseason games — and I know they’re just preseason games — it’s hard not to sit and wonder if things are finally coming together as they should, if the rebuild is harvest results.

Each of these games is watched with a skeptical eye. Last week’s eight-sack performance against the Chargers didn’t get much play here. The Los Angeles line was banged up. The Saints were dialing up blitzes for which their opponent didn’t scheme. The week before it was the Browns. But we’ve seen the defensive starters play 11 drives over the past three weeks and not surrender a single point.

"These last four years I’ve kind of been waiting for us to take that turn, it’s still preseason, but I don’t know if even in 2013 … I don’t know if we played this good early on," safety Kenny Vaccaro said. "Guys are just doing a good job of taking the coaching, the young guys are listening. That’s the biggest thing – guys are making plays."

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Again, keep it in context. Brock Osweiler. Kellen Clemons. Tom Savage. It’s not exactly a murder’s row of quarterbacks or offenses. On the other hand, when during the past three seasons have the Saints performed like this against anyone? This is the team that makes rookie quarterbacks look like stars. Maybe this run counts for something.

And, again, perspective matters. We aren’t talking about a team that needs to be the 1985 Bears. The standard here is an average defense. The Saints don’t need to be suffocating with a high-powered offense. Maybe being something like what the Patriots fielded in 2011, when they lost in the Super Bowl to the Giants would suffice. That team allowed the second-most yards in the NFL but made key turnovers and clamped down in the red zone, allowing 21.4 points per game.

"I mean, we’re not playing The Greatest Show on Turf Rams, but at the same time we got young guys out there, they’re executing, and we’re getting off the field on third down," Vaccaro said. "That’s winning ball. This game is about the little things. People try to over think it. It’s just doing your job."

If the Saints can do that, and the offense is what it’s supposed to be, this team could have finally found the formula for winning football. Again, it’s early, but when’s the last time you looked at this defense and thought something positive was possible? There was some hope last year, but injuries struck the secondary, and all the good feelings evaporated. It’s been a while since hope felt real.

It didn’t seem like optimism was going to be possible this year. Not after defensive tackle Nick Fairley was lost for the season because of a heart condition, and not after cornerback Delvin Breaux broke his fibula a couple of weeks ago. The difference between last year and this year is that after building up the defensive depth, it looks like New Orleans has the players to fill those voids.

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Defensive tackle Sheldon Rankins has played well throughout the preseason and appears to have the explosiveness that he never found as a rookie after breaking his leg before the start of the season. And as for Breaux, his replacement just might be rookie cornerback Marshon Lattimore.

All the same caveats about the preseason need to be in place, but Lattimore has performed better than expected in his first two preseason games. He wasn’t targeted against the Chargers due to his quality coverage.

On Saturday, he was thrown at four times against the Texans, breaking up two passes. The other two catches came when he was playing off coverage in a prevent look, where the goal is often to make a tackle inbounds. His only blemishes are when he misplayed a run against Los Angeles and failed to make a tackle on a crossing route against the Texans.

Those moments are fixable. The most important part — his coverage — has been about as good as it gets. Still, Lattimore would have liked it to be better.

"I feel like it went good, not great," Lattimore said. "Feel like I could have had two picks. I just got to make them plays."

The only way Saturday night could have been better is if the offense matched the defense, which it didn’t. The running game could have been better. Adrian Peterson and Mark Ingram struggled to get anything going operating behind a patchwork offensive line that was without center Max Unger and left tackle Ryan Ramczyk. And while the passing game moved the ball, it struggled to finish drives.

That’s OK. Those guys will figure it out and be fine. Perhaps the takeaway should be that the offense executed a positive end around and had a wide receiver screen go for positive yardage, both to Ted Ginn Jr. Those are both plays the team like to run but often go nowhere. Perhaps Ginn will revitalize those calls.

It’s probably dangerous to even introduce the idea of hope until the defense proves it during the season. It's hard because the Saints have built these feelings a handful of times, and it always ends up the same. The question is will it be any different this time? To that, there is no answer. But at a certain point you have to stop ignoring what you’re seeing, and right now, at the very least, it appears this team is on the right path.

"We've really just got to keep pushing," defensive end Cam Jordan said. "I think we have a lot of talent on our d-line, and I'm excited to see how it shakes out."

That's all you can ask for until the opportunity to prove it in real games finally comes around.