Will the LA Rams get their Hollywood ending? A Super Bowl victory could win over Angelenos

The stereotype about Los Angeles sports fans is that they only love their teams when they’re winning. For decades, this hasn’t been much of a football town.

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“It was never cool to be a Rams fan growing up in LA,” said Ryan Nixon, 40. “It was like this safe team your grandparents liked to watch.”

The Rams only had one winning season as Nixon was a kid, and then the team decamped to the other side of the country. This week, they have a chance to once again win over the city that loves winners, with a story so corny it could be nominated for an Oscar.

The Rams are back in their old hometown after a long and dramatic absence, one that was prolonged for years by the machinations of rival team owners. But even after the team moved back to the city from St Louis in 2016, there was plenty of skepticism about what it would take to make the city care much about its football franchise.

A whole generation of local kids younger than Nixon had grown up without any hometown allegiance, as the Rams played, increasingly poorly, in St Louis. The city had done without an NFL team for 20 years, and there were superstar basketball players, a beloved baseball team and high-quality college football to keep Angelenos’ loyalties tied up. Did it really need the NFL?

Some old-school Rams fans never forgave the team for its departure. ‘When they moved, that was my first experience with the whole ugly side of sports, the strictly-business, money-dominates-everthing-else of sports,” said Ryan Jones, a basketball writer who grew up in Orange county. “That there were LA fans that stuck with them was wild to me. Why would you have a sense of loyalty to a team that