49ers Not Super Until the Finish : Pro football: Saints shut down the champions until Montana, with 1:30 left, drives them to a field goal and 13-12 victory.

The questions that mattered most as Monday night’s game began concerned the San Francisco team and the New Orleans quarterback.

Can the 49ers hold the peak they reached last year?

Is Saint John Fourcade a sandlot player or an NFL quarterback?

On a night when Fourcade played mostly sandlot football, there was never a time when the defending Super Bowl champion 49ers resembled last year’s team--until the last minute and a half. At that late hour San Francisco quarterback Joe Montana won it as usual, this time with a brisk 60-yard field-goal march.

Montana’s fourth completion in five attempts on that drive shook up the Saints and set up the 49er kicker, Mike Cofer, for the 38-yard field goal that overcame the plucky New Orleans defense at last, 13-12, with nine seconds remaining.

The capacity Louisiana Superdome crowd of 68,629 saw only one touchdown all evening, that one scored on a short Montana pass in the second half before Morten Andersen kicked his fourth field goal for a 12-10 New Orleans lead that didn’t quite stand up.

“Somehow, (Montana) got it done,” San Francisco Coach George Seifert said. “Either team could have won it at the end.”

Said New Orleans Coach Jim Mora: “If we had gotten a couple of first downs toward the end, we would have won the football game.”

He was right about that. The Saints didn’t make a first down in four series after Andersen’s fourth field goal.

More surprisingly, Montana, in five chances to overtake the Saints in the fourth quarter, couldn’t make a first down, either, until that last drive.

It was a game that introduced the 49ers in their 1990 bid for an unprecedented fifth Super Bowl championship, but this isn’t the same team that won the last two Super Bowls.

Most glaringly, 49er receivers could seldom find their way into a clearing. Through the ‘80s, these receivers had been famous for the distances they put between themselves and defensive backs, but those days are over, or so it seemed in the Superdome.

The New Orleans secondary was ready for the familiar 49er pass patterns, and with wide receivers Jerry Rice and John Taylor usually too closely guarded to throw to, Montana held the ball a fraction longer than he wanted to.

As a result, the New Orleans defensive line and linebackers gave him a bad night--or more exactly, almost 59 minutes of a bad night.

New Orleans, in fact, was really the better team--except at one position, Fourcade’s. With a sharp, experienced quarterback, the Saints would have won this one by several touchdowns.

And Fourcade did attack the 49ers with occasional brilliance. It was easy to see why eight or nine teams in seven or eight leagues, including the indoor Arena League, have been keeping him around for the last 10 years or so. At medium range, with a receiver in the open, Fourcade usually drilled the ball accurately.

But in the final reckoning, he lost the game with the two poorly thrown passes he delivered on the 49er goal line to intercepting 49ers in the third quarter.

The Saints had San Francisco on the ropes in that quarter. They first sacked Montana into a fumble at the 49er 11-yard line, and soon thereafter they were back at the 49er 18 on Fourcade’s well-thrown pass to wide receiver Floyd Turner for a net gain of 42 yards.

But both times, Fourcade threw it away, as, successively, cornerback Darryl Pollard and safety Ronnie Lott intercepted for the 49ers.

Fourcade went the distance for New Orleans, in part because the club’s veteran, Bobby Hebert, is still holding out. But Hebert had lost his job last December, when Fourcade went on a three-game winning streak that only ended when the champions came back to town Monday night.

The champions, at the end, won it characteristically. Taking possession at his 19-yard line with 1:30 left, Montana earned his first first down since throwing a four-yard scoring pass to tight end Brent Jones early in the third quarter.

He earned it on a pass to Taylor for 25 yards. Then in rapid order, he threw to fullback Tom Rathman for four yards, threw one away, threw to fullback Roger Craig for 11 yards, and threw to Rice for 20.

His last throwaway used up four seconds as Cofer trotted in to win it.

“(Montana) is like Houdini,” New Orleans safety Gene Atkins said.

Said Rathman: “Give Montana a minute at the end, it’s all over.”

But after being sacked on six plays, roughed up on other plays, outgained as a passer by two yards by Fourcade, of all people, Montana said: “I didn’t play worth a damn.”

More exactly, he was a victim of a revamped, improving New Orleans defense that has four of the best linebackers on the planet--from left to right, Rickey Jackson, Sam Mills, Vaughan Johnson and Pat Swilling--plus a pass rusher, for a change: top draft choice Renaldo Turnbull.

When Atkins, Toi Cook and the others in the Saints’ secondary took Rice and Taylor virtually out of the game, Montana was worked over by the tough guys in the New Orleans front seven.

The only touchdown drive that Montana could sustain needed two big penalties and a marvelously executed Montana touchdown play.

On third and three at the New Orleans four-yard line, facing a 3-8 defense with eight Saints in the secondary, Montana rolled out far to his right and read back across the end zone from one sideline to the other. Only one 49er was open, the one on Montana’s far left, Jones. And he found him.