NFL PLAYOFFS : Two More Teams Leaving California : NFC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME : San Francisco Finally Gets Past Dallas, 38-28

Three years of pain poured from the San Francisco 49ers onto the soggy Candlestick Park field Sunday, further soaking it with revenge, redemption and the thick stuff of a champion.

“It was our turn,” said 49er guard Jesse Sapolu after he had finished weeping.

Their turn to stun the Dallas Cowboys early. Their turn to thwart them late. Their turn to win the footraces and fistfights and battles of will.

In their third consecutive year of trying, it was finally their turn to win an NFC championship over the Cowboys, which they did with a 38-28 victory before 69,125.

The 49ers now have two weeks to gain inspiration to play the San Diego Chargers in Super Bowl XXIX in Miami.

They will need every minute.

“This game was as big as some Super Bowls,” said Sapolu, who has been on three of the 49ers’ four Super Bowl teams. “This organization used to dominate. We were used to domination. To see another team come in here and take that away from us for two years . . . we had to get it back.”

And once they stole it from the two-time defending world champions Sunday, they embraced it. And danced with it. And exulted in it.

After stopping the Cowboys twice on fourth down during a furious fourth-quarter comeback attempt, the mud-caked 49ers began celebrating in the final seconds and didn’t stop until most of the stadium had emptied.

Quarterback Steve Young ran around the edge of the field pumping his fist and yelling, “We’re going, we’re going!”

In return, the fans showered him with a cry that used to be, “Joe, Joe, Joe!”

On Sunday, it was “Steve, Steve, Steve!”

Ken Norton Jr. walked in circles, crying. Deion Sanders looked to the sky in memory of his late father, beat his fist on his chest, and said, “Thank you.”

Then owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. did the most emotional thing of all. He grabbed a microphone and guaranteed a Super Bowl victory.

“We will go to Miami and we will bring back a world championship,” he said amid the roaring crowd.

The last time somebody guaranteed something that bold, it was Jimmy Johnson and he was the Cowboys’ coach. But he was fired by owner Jerry Jones last year after Jones proclaimed that “I could find 500 guys who could coach this team.”

At least on this day, Barry Switzer wasn’t one of those 500.

The Cowboys were denied a chance to become the first team to win three consecutive Super Bowls because they committed five turnovers, fell behind, 21-0, before the game was eight minutes old, and did not seem organized enough to pull off a miracle.

“It’s kind of like the Keystone Cops,” Switzer said. “It was a laugher.”

Much of the crowd was laughing at Switzer midway through the fourth period. That is when he stopped a Cowboy drive by drawing a 15-yard penalty for bumping an official while complaining about the lack of a pass interference call against Sanders.

The penalty took the Cowboys out of 49er territory, where they were attempting to cut into a 10-point lead. Two plays later, the drive ended with a sack of quarterback Troy Aikman by Tim Harris.

“I think there will definitely be speculation as to what we would have done if Jimmy Johnson was the coach,” Jones conceded.

Earlier in the quarter, there had been mass confusion when Aikman was being counseled on the field by coaches about running a fourth-down play at the same time kicker Chris Boniol was setting up for a field goal.

And earlier in the game, Switzer surprisingly ran Emmitt Smith on third down and 10 from the 49er 12-yard line.

Smith, who could rarely find running room even when his strained left hamstring allowed him to run, gained only two yards on the play. Boniol then missed a field goal that later became very important.

“The picture I had painted in my mind of what we would do to them . . . they were doing to us,” said Cowboy owner Jones.

Such as starting fights before the game? San Francisco’s Ricky Watters and Dallas’ Lincoln Coleman exchanged punches in the end zone after Watters had knocked the helmet out of Cowboy Tommy Agee’s hand.

Such as trying to unnerve your opponent by yelling at him during introductions then piling on each other at midfield like a college team?

“Right from that start today, we made up our minds that they were not going to beat us,” said 49er receiver John Taylor. “We would leave everything out there on the field.”

But who would have thought it would all come gushing out in the first eight minutes? “When we started out like we did, we knew we had the game,” said 49er linebacker Gary Plummer. “We knew they weren’t used to somebody coming at them like that. We knew they couldn’t handle it.”

Your eight-minute ticker:

Three plays into the game, Eric Davis took a monumental risk by dropping off Michael Irvin and stepping toward Kevin Williams during coverage.

It turned out to be the best risk of his career. Aikman never saw him, throwing the ball to the side of Williams that was suddenly covered by Davis.

Davis, not Williams, caught it. And Davis returned it 44 yards for a touchdown.

Three plays later, Irvin, who set a championship-game record with 192 receiving yards, caught a pass that Davis immediately stripped.

Tim McDonald picked up the fumble and, five plays later, Young lofted a screen pass that Watters grabbed and took 29 yards for a touchdown.

The 49ers weren’t done. Heck, they had barely started.

Kevin Williams was stripped of the ensuing kickoff by Adam Walker, the 49ers heaped on another insult when kicker Doug Brien recovered the fumble . . . and seven plays later they scored again, on William Floyd’s one-yard run.

The only other time in championship-game history that somebody had scored 21 points in the first period, the Chicago Bears finished the 1940 game with a 73-0 victory over the Washington Redskins.

“Then once we had them down, we wanted to kick them,” said Plummer.

With the quick Dallas pass rush stymied by the wet field, with Aikman forced to throw 53 passes in his comeback attempt, the kicking was easy.

So, too, will be the savoring.

“You don’t know how good of a feeling it is to finally get them off your back,” Taylor said with a sigh. “I’ve had to go home each of the last two winters and hear everybody talk about how the Cowboys beat our butts.

“And what could I say? They were right. Until now.”

Young, still being serenaded 15 minutes after the game, stood on a dugout in front of the fans and perhaps described the 49ers’ feelings better.

“Indescribable,” he said.