49ers

Gold miners gave the club its name before it ever played a down: when the franchise joined the All-America Football Conference in 1946, its owners borrowed the nickname of the prospectors who had rushed to California in 1849, betting on their own kind of stake. The Niners have worn red and gold ever since.

Nine league titles followed across four decades, but the run between 1981 and 1994 set the club apart: five Super Bowl wins in that span, starting with a defeat of the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl XVI and closing with a rout of the San Diego Chargers in Super Bowl XXIX. Two earlier NFL Championships, both against the Cleveland Browns in the pre-merger era, sit further back in the record but carry less weight in how the club is remembered.

The 49ers left Kezar Stadium for Candlestick Park in 1971 and stayed there until 2013, before the move south to Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara. The Rams have chased them since the days when both clubs shared the old NFL Western Conference, a rivalry that outlasted stadiums, relocations and decades of realignment.

No one is tied to that golden run more than Joe Montana, the quarterback who won four of those Super Bowls and, alongside Jerry Rice, turned the two-minute drill into the club's signature. Montana's touchdown pass to Dwight Clark in the 1981 NFC Championship game, remembered simply as "The Catch," is still the moment San Francisco fans reach for first.