St. Louis, you can have them back.

What’s that? You don’t want them? You don’t traffic in stolen franchises anymore?

Good call.

That was Super Bowl 53 we watched yesterday, and Rams fans (such as they are) can’t un-see it.

I’m old enough to have watched every Super Bowl ever played, and your Los Angeles Rams just secured a piece of onerous Big Game history:

Fewest points scored: 3.

In a tie with the Miami Dolphins, who lost 24-3 to the Dallas Cowboys in 1972, which may have been before the forward pass was invented.

The Rams fell 13-3 to the New England Patriots in a game that prompted one of my brothers to say: “I feel pain.”

Fair enough.

I feel vindicated, unfortunately, after several warnings that this Rams team, despite the 13-3 record, was ready to be had.

Or, in the case of a championship matchup with New England, ready to be humiliated.

The Rams had the one field goal. In the third quarter. It was anything but a sure thing; it was a 53-yarder by Greg Zuerlein, second-longest in Super Bowl history.

Astonishingly, it tied the game at 3-3. At the time, that was kind of pathetic progress; it guaranteed that the game would not be the first Super Bowl shutout.

It was grim viewing, this game. Especially when the Rams had the ball.

Bill Belichick and the Patriots defense seemed to know what play the Rams would run even before Rams coach Sean McVay could relay the call to quarterback Jared Goff. Receivers were blanketed; blitzes unsettled Goff; the running game evaporated. The McVay versus Belichick head-to-head was a blow-out victory for the 66-year-old man.

The Rams punted the first eight times they had the ball, unprecedented in the Big Game. All told, the two teams punted 14 times. Which made for dull viewing, all that “not scoring” going on, hour after hour. Not only did the Rams lose … they lost ugly. Just about as ugly as anyone has managed.

The sliver of good news for the Rams was this: Their defense played so well that they were in position to win right up until the final three minutes — when Goff was intercepted just short of the end zone and the Rams trailing 10-3.

The Patriots added a field goal, but it ended as the lowest-scoring game in Super Bowl history. Which translates into “dull” for the majority of viewers, who may not have been engrossed by the defensive dominance. “Points” are always preferable, even if one team is scoring nearly all of them.

Various mocking memes banged around the internet, including this collection, poking fun at the four hours of futility.

Some Rams backers will suggest that losing the Super Bowl is just a step along the path to the team winning one, sometime in the near future. Good luck with that.

Most will remember them, perhaps for decades, as the weaker of the two teams in the dullest Super Bowl ever staged.

“Most boring game in Super Bowl history?”

“The one the Rams were in, back in 2019.”