On the day their Super Bowl LVI banner is unveiled, the Rams are embraced again by fans who cherish the team’s first L.A. championship.
Adult beverage sales were brisk, and beads of perspiration that raced through fans’ face paint were even quicker in the sweltering heat at SoFi Stadium.
Neither compared to the speed Rams fans showed to get in the building and in position to celebrate their team’s first Los Angeles Super Bowl championship.
Late-arriving L.A. fans? Not this time. They had somewhere they needed to be.
Never mind that the triple-digit temperatures outside the stadium barely were alleviated in the upper levels of the palace along Prairie Avenue that was the site of the Rams’ Super Bowl LVI victory on Feb. 13 and their season opener Thursday, Sept. 8.
Some fans staked out their positions under the new championship banner well before it was unveiled and didn’t plan to move.
Most didn’t pay much attention to the SoFi debut of the Super Bowl XXXIV banner – you know, the one they won for St. Louis – before the Rams played host to the Buffalo Bills. They were far more interested in the one that commemorated the culmination of a dream that resumed with their return to Southern California in 2016.
“Other teams won championships,” said Michael Lewis of West Los Angeles, a Rams fan since the mid-’70s who sported an old-school No. 85 Jack Youngblood jersey amid a sea of newish threads with Nos. 9 (Matthew Stafford), 10 (Cooper Kupp) and 99 (Aaron Donald).
