Deanna Favre may be a small-town girl from Mississippi, but New York City was a big comfort to her during one of the toughest moments in her life.

Now that her superstar husband, Brett Favre, is the Jets' new quarterback, the raven-haired beauty is ready to re-embrace the city where she underwent successful breast cancer surgery in 2004.

"It's a fun city for them," J.D. Simpson, a Favre family friend, told the Daily News Thursday. "It doesn't bring back bad memories. They think of the hospital and that's all good memories. She's cancer-free."

Dressed in black and wearing matching shades, Deanna Favre waved Thursday at the photographers when she landed on the other side of the Hudson at Morristown Airport.

After her luggage was piled into a waiting SUV, Deanna and the wife of Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum roared off into rural north Jersey, where the Favres are likely to live during the football season.

Simpson said the Jets sent Brett Favre computer printouts of "farms, places to hunt, pictures of deer."

"I feel like somebody who has open arms is really embracing me," the quarterback said, according to Simpson.

Waiting for surgery

Four years ago, a frightened Deanna arrived in the city with a lump in her breast and a desperate need for diversion as she braced herself for cancer surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The city provided.

"We shopped, ate in some fabulous restaurants, and went to see 'Hairspray' on Broadway," she wrote in her best-selling autobiography, "Don't Bet Against Me."

"After a fun girls' night out, we went back to the hotel to watch the Yankees and the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series on TV. ... I was almost able to forget the surgery awaiting me on Friday."

In Green Bay, Deanna was a big fish in a little pond who couldn't make a move without alerting everybody. In New York, she could blend in with the other tourists.

Message of hope

The surgery and the subsequent therapy was successful, and Deanna Favre went on to become a nationally known advocate for breast cancer awareness. She started the Deanna Favre Hope Foundation to get the message out.

Although Deanna is often seen by her husband's side, the 39-year-old remains a private person who still smarts from having her private struggle with cancer played out in public.

"Because my husband is Brett Favre, my diagnosis was announced on national television, grabbed headlines in newspapers and magazines across the country, and was blasted all over the Internet," she wrote on her foundation's Web site. "Within hours, my private nightmare had become a matter of public record."

Deanna Favre was born Dec. 28, 1968, in tiny Kiln, Miss. (pop. 2,000), to a single mother. She knows her biological father. But to her, Kerry Tynes, the man who married her mom, Ann, and raised her as his own, is "dad."

Deanna was a kid when she met her future husband, who is 10 months younger. But they didn't click until high school.

"I didn't care if I had a boyfriend or not," she recalled in an interview with Milwaukee Magazine. "But I remember thinking that week, 'He's really cute. I think I could like him.'"

The feeling was mutual, and soon they were inseparable.

Then, at age 19, Deanna discovered she was pregnant. Brett was the starting quarterback at Southern Mississippi University - and not ready to be a father.

Deanna said her mother broke down crying when she told her, but as they were devout Catholics, abortion was out of the question.

Favre was with her when she gave birth to Brittany in 1989, but the two didn't marry until seven years later - after he became a Green Bay Packer and established himself as one of the league's top quarterbacks.

She stood by him

The early years of their marriage, which produced another daughter, Breleigh, in 1999, were stormy. But Deanna stood by her husband as he battled addictions to pain killers and later alcohol.

When Deanna was diagnosed with cancer in 2004, it was Favre who urged her to have the lumpectomy at Sloan-Kettering. He even shaved his head as a show of solidarity when his wife's tresses were ravaged by chemotherapy.

Now a picture of health, Deanna credits her husband's love and her faith in God for her recovery.

"Of course, there is perhaps no greater tool in the fight against breast cancer than the Bible," she wrote on her foundation's Web site.With Andy Martino

oyoungmisuk@nydailynews.com