Remember the big SoCal sports story of January 12?

NFL owners voted 30-2 to allow the Rams to move back to Los Angeles, after 21 seasons in St. Louis.

Over the next few days came stories about the reaction in Los Angeles, where the team might be headquartered, where it might train, what sort of talent the club had …

And then it seemed as if the Rams dropped out of the news cycle. At least from the perspective of living in France and following ESPN, the New York Times and Britain’s Guardian newspaper. (And I wonder if the team got much more attention from local media, in Los Angeles.)

And, remember, the Rams played in greater Los Angeles from 1946 through 1994. Imagine how ignored the San Diego Chargers or Raiders would have been had they moved to L.A. this season.

So it probably was a very good idea for the Rams to trade six high picks over the next two drafts (a 1, two 2s and a 3 this year, Nos. 1 and 3 next) to get the top pick in the 2016 NFL draft — which goes off on April 28.

Had they not made this deal, a week ago, I might not have even noticed the NFL draft, the league’s biggest offseason news event, is looming.

This is a good move by the Rams for several reasons.

1. It is the best way to generate additional interest in the team. It isn’t often that a club gets the top pick in the draft (and the top pick hasn’t been traded since 2004), and NFL fans of all stripes are likely to be curious about what the Rams intend to do.

2. The top pick is a news story far beyond a year or season. It is a story pretty much forever. Fans and reporters and executives tend to remember who went first, year by year, and what sort of career that person had. How that player performs is monitored closely, and eventually the top pick will be assigned a place in the “history of top picks”. (Over the past two decades, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning and Orlando Pace were unqualified successes; Tim Couch, Courtney Brown and JaMarcus Russell were unqualified busts.)

3. It seems clear the Rams will select a quarterback with the top pick, and it probably will be one of Jared Goff of Cal or Carson Wentz of North Dakota State. The former played for a big school and ran up big numbers; the latter played in the second tier of college football but won two national championships and is being fawned over as the guy with the great work ethic. Anyway … all the Rams are trying to do here is find the QB who will lead them to glory for at least a decade.

4. And, by the way, this is the first time the Los Angeles Rams have had the top pick since 1963, which not many of us remember. Back then, the Rams made Terry Baker of Oregon State the No. 1. Baker was the Heisman Trophy winner but a washout in the NFL.

Another benefit to this story is that even the silliest of fans is allowed to have an opinion, when it comes to the draft, and particularly when it comes to quarterbacks.

The optimistic take on L.A.’s new-old NFL team … is that they spent the past several years loading up everywhere — except quarterback. They did take a QB with their top pick, in 2010, Sam Bradford, but he never quite worked out and could end up not much above “bust” status, which has to make fans a little nervous about the decision at the top of the draft the Rams have to make next Thursday.

In short, the Rams haven’t had a good quarterback since Kurt Warner, more than a decade ago.

Anyway, here we are talking about the Rams, which not much of anyone was doing before they made this trade. Good call.