AS WE TRIED TO STAY ALIVE WITH A PLACE TO LIVE, WHY WERE THE RAMS PLAYING?

Los Angeles is praying extreme winds and fires won’t blow us away, yet a local NFL team relocated a Monday night playoff game in Arizona, which seemed weird and wrong as death rates were monitored

The only way to describe my firestorm fear is my humble space in the yellow zone. A forecast map has me in an elevated location but not in the extreme area, which is red or the ugliest purple. I live five miles south of Pacific Palisades on the Ocean Front Walk, a path we will avoid because of tanks and military vehicles.

I have not been evacuated. My pickleball court has ongoing matches in Santa Monica’s promenade. Restaurants are open. Bars are serving drinks. Bike zones are navigable. The iconic signage above the pier still invites visitors.

Only five fricking miles — 8,800 yards — exists between an annihilated life and some sort of spooky normalcy. That could change uncontrollably over the next day or two or three, assuming the wind gusts haven’t blurred already. They might whip into a frenzy nearing 70 mph and ship all of Los Angeles into a permanent red-flag swirl and splash us into the sea.

“We are not in the clear as of yet, and we must not let our guard down,” local fire chief Kristin Crowley said Monday.

“This is one of the loudest ways that we can shout,” shouted Rose Schoenfeld of the National Weather Service. “This is a continued extreme fire weather and wind scenario.”

Absorbing every blow-the-cerebrum visual from people who won’t have mental balance for years — if not forever, in the Palisades and Altadena — their devastation can become ours with another tactical blunder. There have been too many dolts feeding a ferocious Trump system, from a mayor who was in Ghana last week and a governor who listens to people who don’t provide him answers — when he’s the man in charge. “I’m the governor of California and wanna know the answer. I’ll be candid with you, I wasn’t getting straight answers,” Gavin Newsom said. “When you start getting different answers, then I’m not getting the actual story.”

So forgive me for inquiring why one of the local football teams, the Rams, played a postseason game in Arizona. If the weather burns more homes and buries the masses, didn’t we feel idiotic watching a Monday night contest relocated from SoFi Stadium to State Farm Stadium? The gesture warmed some hearts, with the Rams using a plane and the division rival Cardinals sending two more planes to move 355 people, six dogs and two cats. The playoffs are important in their lives, and the Minnesota Vikings agreed to the dramatic shift. More than 40,000 tickets were purchased by Rams fans, some of whom were transported on buses rented by Kelly Stafford, whose husband is Matthew, the veteran quarterback. The game was sold out.

I don’t care who won. I didn’t watch.

A comment from team president Kevin Demoff stuck in my senses inside the yellow zone. He said: “Talking about a football game and the challenges of moving it sound trite. We’re just talking about a game when thousands of people have lost homes. You almost feel guilty having something to work on, having the ability to have all these resources at your disposal to evacuate when so many people get a notice, have to flee and never get to go home again. That juxtaposition isn’t lost on any of us.”

It made me ask why there was any juxtaposition at all. Couldn’t the game have been delayed — or cancelled — to see if more structures were destroyed and more lives were lost? The fires will continue to be the biggest global story until the winds die down. Can we really sit and watch an L.A. team try to win one for the city? Why would sports even matter when we could die tomorrow? “This was the right decision,” Demoff said. “It’s heartbreaking for our fans, for our players. Our players earned a home playoff game which is a great testament to that. But this situation merits that we play that somewhere else.”

The team found tranquility while practicing a state away from the chaos. “I felt like I was at peace,” running back Kyren Williams said. “We didn’t really have to worry about anything except for playing ball. There’s a feeling amongst the team — this is for L.A. This is for hope back at home that they can cling onto, that the Rams are going to be the people who can take them away from whatever they’re going through.”

In Woodland Hills, out in the Valley, the Rams practiced in smoke as a fire developed nearby. They were in the fray. If Sean McVay beats his coaching buddy, Kevin O’Connell, the Rams will advance to the NFL quarterfinals this weekend in Philadelphia. They’ll call it a breathtaking story. But at what point does a football game take precedence over the scariest flames we’ve seen in our lives? Some folks in southern California appreciate the effort, but they are not sitting in any map zone. Nor were the Chargers, who weren’t part of the smoke way down in El Segundo.

I am. I’m five miles away. I didn’t mind watching teams in other cities play, setting up a classic MVP grudge match between Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson while Eagles receiver A.J. Brown was reading a book on the sideline — “Inner Excellence,” by Jim Murphy — that became Amazon’s hottest seller overnight. “I wasn't frustrated at all. I figured that's what y'all probably thought,” Brown said. “Why do you always think I be frustrated? Dang. I like to read. I use it to refocus and lock in despite what may transpire in the game good or bad. People tend to create controversy when they don't know the truth.”

Then I saw Jayden Daniels providing more images of a rookie quarterback becoming a superstar. “It means a lot, man. You could just see all the fans over here, man, they’re waiting for us,” he said. “They’ve waited a long time for this moment and this feeling, so I’m just so happy for them. That's just the brotherhood, the togetherness that we have in the locker room. People can see how close we are off of the field. We're always hanging around each other, everybody gets along with each other. I think those moments, when times get tough, we fall back on those types of moments.”

But that was followed by an incisive comment from the quarterback of the Washington Commanders, who won a game in Tampa. He thought of Los Angeles, having grown up 65 miles away in San Bernardino. “I mean, just praying for everybody and their families and stuff like that. Obviously, it's not really the area I'm from, but it's still Southern California, that's still home to me,” he said. “So, you never want to see nobody go through that or have to deal with stuff like that."

The Rams feel the same way. That said, they shouldn’t have been forced to play a game while America awkwardly watched. If the gusts blast me into the red or purple zone, my final word on Earth will be juxtaposition.

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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.