Win Does Wonders for Confidence : Rams: They head to Pittsburgh for Monday night game saying the worst is behind them after ending three-game losing streak.

They say the nightmare is over. They say it’s morning again in Ramsland. They admit to a smidgen of bias, but the Rams have too much pride in their stride right now to care.

Wipe those cheery smiles off their faces at your own risk.

Because the Rams (2-4), as they explain it, are back. Back from their five-game early-season swoon, back ready to step up and challenge the big boys. Back, toughened by their bout with mediocrity, and feeling ready to zoom off on one of their typical post-slump victory sprees.

Battle-tested. Dissension-proof. Tough and caring. Or something like that.

“I think the monkey’s off our back,” said Coach John Robinson, who was part psychiatrist, part cheerleader, part leader under fire during the 1-4 start.

Heading into Monday night’s game at Pittsburgh with a one-game winning streak, Robinson seems to relish dropping the under fire part of the description from both himself and his team.

“You’re able to think,” he said. “You’re not turning around here, fighting off this (controversial) stuff. You get to talk about Pittsburgh. Last week, we were talking about holes and how much deeper we were getting.

“(The Rams are) just playing now. And you get into kind of a flow when things are going good. . . . When they’re going good for us, you go out and you know what to do on the practice field, everybody knows where to go, what to do, how to work. It takes awhile to get into that attitude, and we’re beginning it now.”

The Rams, Robinson is quick to point out, have been through this sort of trauma before and emerged healthy and full of late-season momentum.

There was the 1-7 start in 1987, which was followed by five victories. There were four consecutive defeats after a 7-2 start the next season, followed by three victories that closed the regular season.

And most pointedly, there was the 0-4 run last season after a 5-0 start, followed by a 6-1 regular-season finish and a trip to the NFC championship game.

Lots of people predicted doom in those times, too, and lots of people were wrong.

So conventional NFL wisdom says watch out for the Rams. With their annual nose-dive out of the way early this season, who knows what kind of run they can muster? The Rams, not ones to buck a trend, agree.

This is assuming, of course, that they don’t turn around Monday night and lose another. How much character building can a team take one season, anyway?

“We were sort of stuck there for a while,” receiver Flipper Anderson said. “We needed to get the confidence back. And I think we’re getting it back. We feel like we’re beginning to play like we know we can, and once that happens, we know what we can do.”

Said defensive end Doug Reed: “I think the pressure’s still on. But it’s a good feeling to get on the right track and get a win under a our belt. This is what we needed.”

The Rams look back at the troubles and say they are stronger because of them. When the sticks and stones and sharp words were being hurled at them, they didn’t fall apart.

“I just think that we kept believing in ourselves,” quarterback Jim Everett said. “I don’t think that Coach Robinson would allow one of his teams to have dissension.

“We had some losses, but we knew that if you go back and break down each game, a majority of the time we were doing things correct. It’s just that those few times that we weren’t were disastrous.

“We knew that we could play football, we just had to eliminate the disastrous part.”

So, the Rams are looking at last week’s victory over the Atlanta Falcons as the real beginning of their season. The first five games were scarred by injuries, training camp holdouts and a failure to adapt to a new defensive system.

“I don’t know if we can forget those five games because we know we played them and we know we lost four of them,” Anderson said. “But we know that wasn’t really us. We know that’s not how we’re going to play the rest of the season. We knew that all along.”

Even the satisfaction of their easy victory over Tampa Bay in the second week of the season was tempered by worry, Robinson says. Too many problems.

“I don’t think I felt good about it then,” Robinson said before ticking off the familiar litany of early-season Ram woes, from the uncertainty over Cleveland Gary to Jerry Gray’s absence to the continuing discomfort with the new defense to an assortment of other things. “I think we worried.”

Gary has established himself as a potential 1,000-yard rusher, and is coming off his first 100-yard game. Gray is back. The new defensive system is gone and most of the players seem thrilled by that.

The focus is still there, too, the Rams say.

“That playoff stuff is for the birds, man,” linebacker Kevin Greene said. “We get there, we get there with a lot of hard work. We’re not thinking about it at all. We’re thinking about the next game, the Pittsburgh Steelers, that’s all we’re thinking about.”

They are 2-4, and they are as confident as 2-4 could ever make a team.

“I hope we can continue it,” Everett said. “All I can say right now is we’ve put one step forward, and we’ve got to get the other foot going and start getting everything flowing and go one step at a time.”