Nobody ever asks if Freddie Solomon was open on The Play, too. A shame, when you think of it. Now there's no way of knowing what kind of NFL general manager he might have made.

Solomon was the receiver who wasn't Dwight Clark for The Catch, the touchdown pass from Joe Montana that won the 1981 NFC championship game, elevated both men and slapped down the Dallas Cowboys for an entire decade.

The Catch made both men, plus the San Francisco 49ers, Bill Walsh and Eddie DeBartolo, historical icons. It was Clark's leap, Montana's off-balance throw, a superb supporting cast, Walsh's system and DeBartolo's drunken-sailor-on-leave spending habits that were advanced that day in the north end zone of Candlestick Park.

And it sprung two extra decades of great football for the Bay Area to enjoy, even as the Oakland Raiders were marching defiantly to Los Angeles, with fingers up to the commissioner's office.

Indeed, the Bay Area had been treated to two Super Bowls even before The Catch. The Raiders had drilled Minnesota in 1977 and Philadelphia in 1981, and had a mini-dynasty that stretched back to 1969. They didn't win as many rings as Pittsburgh in the '70s, but they were the most fearsome silver medalist of the modern era.

But when they left, the 49ers had already moved past them. Clark's catch put the 49ers in their first Super Bowl, and by the time the Raiders came back, poorer, crankier and nearly irrelevant from years of being ignored in Los Angeles, the 49ers had won four Super Bowls and had become one of the great teams in NFL history.

Wait, though. There's more. Because of The Catch, Montana had gone from promise to fulfillment, and stayed there, one of the two or three best quarterbacks who ever lived.

Because of The Catch, Walsh's West Coast Offense, adapted as it was from principles he learned from Paul Brown, Sid Gillman and others, gained such acceptance that each of the four coaches in this year's conference championships can trace their careers back to him. And Walsh was declared a genius, and never seemed to shy from the compliment.

Because of The Catch, Clark managed to work his way up the 49er corporate ladder to the point where . . . well, to the point where he ended up in Cleveland as the Browns' general manager after siding with Carmen Policy in his ugly fight with DeBartolo over . . . basically, everything.

And because of The Catch, DeBartolo graduated from rich kid screwing up a bad thing to the last great owner of the pre-salary cap era. He spent with a snow shovel, demanded results to match the spending, and got both.

It all ended last year, because gravity bites everyone in the hinder eventually. But because of The Catch, everything else good that happened to the 49ers after it was made possible. From the moment of The Catch, the 49ers won 215 of 296 games, a percentage of .728 over 17 years.

Nobody in NFL history has managed that for even half that stretch. All because of The Catch.

This may seem like the 49ers are getting shorted here, that we are forgetting the possibility that they could have won those other three Super Bowls anyway. But we don't know that. Many potentially great teams missed their one opening and never got another shot. Maybe if there hadn't been The Catch, DeBartolo would have grown impatient waiting. Maybe he would have fired Walsh, or insisted that Montana be traded, or something slightly less stupid.

We'll never be sure of what would have been if it hadn't happened. We only know what happened because it did. And what happened was an extension of the Raider dynasty that kept the Bay Area football-first for another 20 years.

And Freddie Solomon? Well, we'll never know that one, either. But at least he's not in Cleveland.