Arnold,

At a moment like this, so many long years after last the team stood so heavily on the cusp of history, it's moving to hear a voice as clear and evocative as yours. I was a million miles away in another cultural universe in those years between 1970 and 1972; the 49ers meant literally nothing to me then. A maladapted, cut-loose orphaned youth at the turn of the decade, I had already begun to swallow huge chunks of Americana in the local public library - a place I didn't realize until many years later was staffed by a few trailblazing leftie lovers of the arts - and I had gained a sense of the importance of baseball and football in American life from novels like Malamud's The Natural and Kerouac's The Vanity of Duluoz...but it's a measure of the narrowness of media in those days that the American athletes I knew most about and most admired during that period were the likes of Cassius Clay and Bob Beamon, Olympians. The provincial contests of North American tribes were a world undreamt of.

As you know, as a callow 9-year old I selected as the team I would support in the English football league a franchise, Stoke City, that had never won anything - anything - in its almost 150 year history. It didn't matter, back then, somehow.. there was still so much power behind the idea that it was more important to take part, to play well, than to win. Coming to America, being instructed in the magic of the Bill Walsh offense, and suddenly finding myself rooting for a team that won not just one but two, three, four, five championships... that was unprecedented for me. It provided joy as unalloyed as the joy I felt simply being here on this side of the Atlantic, away from all of the stultifying weight of history that Europe heaped on all of its children in those days. What a treat, a San Francisco treat, Rice-a Roni! Nobody to apologize to, no p's or q's to mind. A bunch of athletes and their trainers provided a fabulous platform to dance across, be merry, and even take the piss.

All these years later, I find that it's America that is heaping the weight of history on its children. It's not only what I've learned about the history of the SF franchise, or the NFL and the people behind it, but what I've learned about myself, what I thought I was looking for by coming here, and what I can see now between myself and the smiling, shining lies decent people have to tell every minute of every day in order to get by here. I listen to myself saying such inappropriate things for a sports blog and I wish I were 20 or 30 years younger, or 20 or 30 IQ points stupider, so that I could leap up on the poop deck of this sharp-bowed ship and yell my heart out and cheer it into that happy harbor it hasn't visited in so many years. No amount of wishing will make it so. That is the curse of time.

The drubbing of the Dolphins and the Broncos are two of the peaks of this team's story. I remember other moments too, none more poignantly than Leonard Marshal breaking Joe Montana's back on a play that would be outlawed today; and how long it took Steve Young to get that damn monkey off his back; and how George Seifert was the coolest-looking coach I ever saw on a sideline.

Now I'm waiting. One more game, two more games, then it will be happy hour. I really, really hope the team gets there. It has been, frankly, hell living through these last 10 to 15 years as a 49ers fan. It's an effect of the new media, no doubt. In 1989 there were only newspapers to read or one or two radio shows to listen to. Since the 49ers won Super Bowl #5, the amount of coverage of the team, the various ways to tap into its progress and to connect with other fans, have grown exponentially. Used to be you could turn a blind eye, so to speak. Over the last decade, the combination of new social media and the growth of ESPN and other sports-dedicated media has made the whole sordid sphere of athletic activity seem much more important than it really is, and invited fans to spend way more time thinking about it than it really warrants.

That's okay. Following the progress of the 49ers since 1994 has been fairly similar to following a great soap opera. With a little luck, it won't continue to resemble life for fans, say, of the Philadelphia Eagles who, like my fellow Stoke City fans, have NEVER known what it feels like to reach the summit of the sport. It will feel different.

I remember the old joke about the old bull and the young bull on a hilltop looking down at a field of heifers and the young bull saying let's run down there and have a heifer, to which the old bull replies, no, let's walk down there and have them all. I seem to have become an old bull, and I see now that it's not as much fun as being a young bull.

So...RUN DOWN THERE AND TAKE ONE!