When the Cardinals left after the 1987 season, St. Louis was rather proud of itself. Frank Deford praised our town in Sports Illustrated for sending such a loser packing. "Good riddance" was the attitude, and no wonder. As any Football fan here can tell you, the Big Red never hosted a playoff game.

But after a couple of years, reality set in. We had no NFL team. We missed it. And we paid exorbitantly to get the Rams after losing out to Carolina and Jacksonville in the expansion sweepstakes.

Now only the Detroit Lions are keeping the Rams from being the worst team in the NFL, and some fans are telling Chip Rosenbloom to take his team elsewhere.

There's plenty wrong with this picture, and with the idea that the Rams are the Big Red all over again. For starters, look at the obvious: The Rams won a Super Bowl. In 14 seasons here, the Rams have been to the playoffs five times and brought five playoff games to St. Louis.

The rap on the Cardinals was that Bill Bidwill was too cheap to win. Say what you will about the Rams, but cheap they aren't. If they've squandered millions of dollars on players who didn't produce, at least they've tried. They sign their draft picks in a timely manner, they have few holdouts, and they try to fill their needs through free agency, if seldom wisely in recent years.

It's one thing to withhold support from a team that doesn't care if it wins. It's another to turn your back on a team that has given this city more thrills than the Big Red ever did.

Yes, the Rams are terrible. The front office has been incompetent. But it's still NFL Football, and if you're a fan of the game, there's plenty of entertainment to be had. If St. Louis doesn't want the Rams, some other city would love to have them.

Sure, the NFL probably is alone in expecting fans to show up no matter how bad a team is. It has the most popular product in U.S. sports, and that's the price of having a team. There's an arrogance about it and if you don't like it, fine, but that's the reality.

Isaac Bruce had it right last Sunday when he expressed his disappointment at the empty seats in St. Louis and pointed out that the Kansas City Chiefs are awful, too, but their fans still turn out. In a smaller market - and bigger stadium - the Chiefs are averaging 14,000 fans more than the Rams despite having an identical record.

The same goes for Pittsburgh, Green Bay, New York, Washington and lots of other places. They have had lousy teams at times, but their games aren't blacked out on local television.

The Rams haven't been here very long, really, not the generations it took for the baseball Cardinals to become part of the fabric of St. Louis. And it will never happen if the 15,000 or so fans who used to come downtown keep staying away.

It's a pity, because St. Louis has some of the best Football fans around. To see 40,000 people yelling encouragement, pleading for their 2-12 team to make a stop on third down, is to see sports fans at their best. Or the most misguided. It all depends on your point of view.

Just remember that if the NFL leaves again, it won't return. And St. Louis will go back to being what some NFL owners sneered when they voted us down for expansion - just a baseball town.

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Mike Reilly, a copy editor in the Post-Dispatch's sports department, has lived in St. Louis for 47 years, but this season was his first as a Rams season-ticket holder.