Would you like to know what the most surreal experience of my life was?  The 1999-2000 NFL season.  First a boatload of backstory.

When I grew up we had an NFL team here in St. Louis only it wasn’t the Rams.  It was the Cardinals.  In a way the Cardinals were kind of the NFL’s Chicago Cubs which was fitting since they’d moved here from there.  But there was a key difference.

The Cubs have never won anything but they had and I guess still have this lovable quality to them.  They were kind of like your kid who is not any good at sports but goes out and tries his hardest anyway. 

He wants to succeed he really does and it eats him up inside(and breaks your heart) every time he strikes out misses a tackle or shoots another air ball with time running out.  So if he timidly suggests pizza after the game you’re delighted to oblige.

There was very little that was lovable about the St. Louis Football Cardinals.  Oh the Cardinals had plenty of great players(blind squirrels and all that) a few of which are in the Hall of Fame.  For a long time Larry Wilson was the football Stan Musial around here. 

But the front office was kind of like a kid who doesn’t try real hard and doesn’t care if he fails.  Their promotions always seemed half-assed; I got this vibe that the team was just marking time here until those stupid Chicagoans got over their ridiculous Bear infatuation and called them home.

So even on those three occasions when the Cardinals made the playoffs during their stay here there was always the unsaid thought going around among those of us who lived and died with the team that “They’ll find a way to screw it up.”

And they did.  Each of their three playoff appearances none of which took place in St. Louis was a first-round blowout.  Watch the Cardinals long enough and you soon realized that the Super Bowl was not and would never be on your radar screen.

The football day of the year around here our Super Bowl was Draft Day.  It took place on a weekday then and it wasn’t the spectacle than that it is now or many of us here would have thrown Draft Day parties.  You couldn’t get through to the TV or radio stations the newspapers or the sports lines.

Because EVERYBODY in St. Louis had one question.  How bad are they going to screw it up this year?

Our bad draft picks were legendary.  Texas A&M running back Larry Stegent whose knees were pretty much blown out when we picked him and whose NFL career consisted of approximately four plays.  Tennessee wide receiver Clyde Duncan who couldn’t catch footballs.

Missouri quarterback Steve Pisarkiewicz who had a gun for an arm but who was short couldn’t run and eventually cost football legend Bud Wilkinson his head-coaching job.  And I’ll never forget the deer-in-the-headlights look I got back from my intense deaf friend when I told him that we’d drafted injury-prone Colorado State quarterback Kelly Stouffer(who never played a down here).

So when the Cardinals demanded a new stadium didn’t get one and departed for Arizona a lot of us didn’t care.  A lesser team(when the Canadian Football League tried to expand south of the border I would have been totally on board if they’d put a team here) or no team at all was better than the Cardinals.

Fast forward to the Rams.  Their first few years here were Cardinalesque.  Then came 1999.  In the last or next-to last preseason game starting quarterback Trent Green’s knee was blown out by a cheap shot by the Chargers’ Rodney Harrison leaving us with some journeyman QB named Kurt Warn363er running things.

Oh.  Okay I thought.  More of the same.

Wrong.  The Rams started to win.  And win.  And win.  And win.  What’s happening I thought to myself.  Then there were a couple of back-to-back losses.  There we go I figured back to normal.

Wrong again.  We kept winning and winning and winning.  We ended up with the best record in the NFC which meant that we’d…host a…playoff game.

Maybe more than one.  And all of them at home.

First game was Minnesota.  We blew ‘em out.  Then came Tampa Bay.  It was close it was tight it was exciting as hell but we pulled it out.

We were going to the…the…the…Super…um…Bowl.