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In a sea of purple, he sees what’s missing in L.A.

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The bite in the air tells you that it is deep into the football season. But in Baltimore, you need no such indicator. That’s because the Ravens are everywhere.

Hours before they beat the Miami Dolphins in a home game Sunday, this city turned purple. The Ravens’ color is not so much a pigmentation as it is a symbol. This city literally wears its love for its NFL team on its sleeve. And its chest, pants, shoes, fingers and every conceivable vacant spot for wearing and draping.

The Ravens beat a decent Miami Dolphins team, 26-10, and now share the best record in the NFL with four other teams at 6-2.

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The fever is here. It isn’t just that 71,305 attended in M & T Bank Stadium, nor that all but a handful wore at least something purple. Nor is it just that the parking lots are sprinkled with RavenMobiles, people’s personal RVs painted completely purple and sprinkled with team logos for a nice color accent.

It’s more that this team gives this community an identity it is proud of, even when it is not 6-2 and not spurring daily discussions in the local media about the possibility of a Super Bowl.

This is a place where John Harbaugh is not Jim’s brother. Here, it is the other way around.

On Fridays here during the NFL season, many schools promote the concept of wearing Ravens jerseys. One grandfather, who has proudly escaped the concept of windchill factors by residing on the Left Coast, is informed that his grandson favors the jersey of Ravens running back Ray Rice. He must have outgrown the Kobe jersey.

The morning after brings the local paper and page after page of Ravens stories. Other things have occurred in the world, but the clearly most compelling thing from Sunday’s news mix was that which had a purple hue.

All of this triggers the thought that, just maybe, it is time be a bit more welcoming toward the NFL experience in that one place where, unlike anywhere else, the letters N-F-L conjures up images of men with hands in our wallet pockets. That place, of course, would be Los Angeles.

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The NFL left us, in a nice one-two punch, 16 years ago. The evacuation leaders were Georgia Frontiere and Al Davis. Georgia is now dead, and we’re not certain about Al.

The departures were about money, a better deal, the grass (and bank accounts) greener on the other side of the street. We snarled for a while, then quickly shrugged and got on with our lives. We even took pride, and often verbalized it, in the fact that, unlike so many other cities, we had plenty of life outside of the NFL. Let them have their tailgate parties in mittens and ear muffs, we said. Let them find their community identity in a football team. We’ll go to the beach.

We went through years and years of newspaper stories and broadcasts with the news that significant steps had been taken to get a team back. We talked about sites that were downtown, uptown, all around the town. But it always turned out to be a big lie. The NFL always seemed to want us, but always at a price we wouldn’t pay. Let multimillionaires become billionaires with their own money, not ours, we reasoned. We were proud of that stance. Still are.

We had so many stops and starts that we weren’t sure whether this was a sports negotiation or a line dance. Our politicians stepped on Peter O’Malley’s toe. Michael Ovitz and Eli Broad got involved and soon were undercut and blindsided by the NFL and a Texas billionaire named Robert McNair. There always seemed to be something in the works that never worked.

Even now, we have Ed Roski with land and a plan in the City of Industry, poised to break ground if one of the existing NFL teams breaks ranks with its community. Suffice to say, that will not be the Ravens. There are also rumblings of renewed interest in a downtown site, with the Phil Anschutz group possibly back in the game. Staples Center and the area around it have proved that, while others talk, Anschutz builds.

Still, the NFL remains greedy and arrogant and Los Angeles remains righteous and stubborn. When it is like that, seldom the twain shall meet.

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But there is no escaping what an NFL team can bring in the way of entertainment and unity to a community, even a community such as Los Angeles, which is more sprawling megalopolis than city.

Maybe bygones will be bygones in time for our grandchildren’s children to wear an NFL jersey to school on Fridays in the fall, and the words on the jersey will include “Los Angeles.”

Might be kind of fun.

bill.dwyre@latimes.com

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