AND MANY TIMES THEY GO DOWN THERE...

AND MANY TIMES THEY GO DOWN THERE AND CATCH THE BALL AND IT’S SIX POINTS

The last time the Rams and the 49ers were this good, in the same season, playing each other with this much at stake, they faced off for the 1989 NFC championship at Candlestick ... and there goes Ronnie Lott, fading back like Willie Mays to knock down a sure Ram touchdown pass ... and here is Jim Everett, sacking himself ... and that’s Joe Montana, completing 26 of 30 passes in a 30-3 49er rout that marked the beginning of the end of the Los Angeles/Anaheim Rams and the slow crawl to the bottom of the NFC West and out of town on the interstate to Missouri and

Since then, the Ram-49er rivalry has done the downward spiral--the 49ers winning 17 straight from mid-1990 through 1998, the Rams winning the last five in a row, most recently a sloppy 30-26 decision in San Francisco on Sept. 23, allowing this once-great NFL feud to sink below Saints-Falcons, Saints-Rams and Panthers-themselves within the NFC West.

But today, the Rams and 49ers are 9-2, angling for the inside track to the Super Bowl, and it’s so good to see the old animosity bubbling to the surface again.

Early in the week, San Francisco safety Lance Schulters fired it up by calling the Ram receiver corps the softest in the NFL. “You can put that in the paper,” Schulters told Bay Area writers. “They are soft. They want to go down there and catch the ball and fall down, or go out of bounds. I wish they would take me on, or come across the middle and not slide when I’m coming at them.”

Longtime observers of this series have to like the sound of that. So too does Ram Coach Mike Martz, who never read a quote he couldn’t spin into motivational bulletin-board fodder and is so happy now to have his pregame speech already written for him.

The line: St. Louis by 7.