The NFL owners meeting in Baltimore is about to break up, and with adjournment comes another ritual -- the breaking down of the barriers along the roadways that lead into Los Angeles.

CONFIDENTIAL PLANS

The NFL may have taken over as America's No. 1 sport, but in the No. 2 media market, the league remains absent. This week, ESPN.com investigates the mystery of how the league lived and died in Los Angeles. Monday: How L.A. lost the NFL. Tuesday: Where does L.A. rate on the NFL's priority list? Wednesday: Which teams might relocate to Los Angeles? Thursday: Why doesn't L.A. care about being NFL-less? Plus, a football fantasy: The Los Angeles Rams win Super Bowl XXXIV. Friday: What is the NFL's future in Los Angeles?

Yes, another meeting has come and gone without an announcement from Commissioner Paul Tagliabue that the NFL is returning to L.A., and the sighs of relief could, if channeled, blow down every building from the airport to the Convention Center.

You see, it's been more than five years since the Rams and Raiders fled the jurisdiction to find happiness somewhere else. The Rams have it, the Raiders are still looking for it, but the essential point remains the same.

That essential point is that nobody replaced them in Los Angeles, and the people seem, if not delighted, then certainly content.

Of course, the people of Los Angeles are not known for their religious devotion to the diligence it would take to keep their city NFL-free. They must keep their dukes up at all times to avoid the horror of waking up one day to find that football players have moved next door.

This means, of course, filling their weekends with other pastimes -- skiing, picnicking, family reunions, gossiping about movie stars, following O.J. Simpson's wacky hijinks -- why, the possibilities are endless, as befits the entertainment capital of the world.

Still, there is always some new story of a disenchanted owner ready to bolt his own burg and try to rediscover the new world -- if it isn't Bill Bidwill, it's Al Davis, and if it isn't John and Denise York, it's Red McCombs. That in itself is an amusement of board game quality: "Name The Next Los Angeles NFL team."

Thus, those barricades that go up every time more than three owners gather over a shrimp table will have to be strengthened and other methods employed to keep L.A. free of blocking sleds and sweetheart stadium deals.

And so they are. They keep the Coliseum standing as a daily reminder of what keeps the NFL out. The citizens of Pasadena defend their property rights against encroachment of the Rose Bowl with signs that read "Stay Off Our Lawn," "ABC -- Anybody But the Cardinals" and "My Lawyer Will Be In Touch." The city of Irwindale has a "See The Hole We Dug For Al" amusement park that is open 11 months out of the year.

So far, it's worked with remarkable efficacy. There are teams across the breadth of NASCAR Nation, from North Carolina to Tennessee, and San Antonio's political establishment is hiking up its skirts for any team looking for a town to fleece. But in L.A.? Nothing.

This, however, is no reason for the citizens to become complacent. They have spent five years without the NFL and have discovered what the baseball fans learned in 1994 -- life not only goes on, but it goes on as if nothing had happened at all.

More to the point, they have learned that the only reason to want an NFL team is need. If a city really thinks it needs the NFL to make a difference in the quality of its life, then it should pursue even the most modest forms of ownership -- your Tom Bensons, your Mike Browns, your Jeff Luries yearning to be wooed.

Los Angeles, though, needs for nothing except Northern California's water. Los Angeles has everything -- so much of everything, in fact, that one more thing more or less can only be irrelevant.

Besides, when you have everything, storage becomes a problem.

So the good people of Los Angeles have no right to relax their stance now that they've seen five years of the good life. So far, they've managed to avoid the problem with political infighting, financial bungling and the kind of persistent and aggressive neglect it takes to get the NFL to understand the meaning of "No, damn it, I don't want any. Now get off my porch or my rottweiler will show you what your pants are for."

L.A. cannot be sure, though, that the political climate will stay as it is, or that somebody with more money than sense will just stick up a stadium and put out a "For Rent" sign. This isn't like keeping a Burger King out of a residential neighborhood. The NFL is nothing if not persistent.

Thus, the people of Los Angeles will have to be persistent as well. The next owners meeting is scheduled for October, and the barricades will have to come back out. One checkpoint sleeping on the job is all it takes for the good people of this American megalopolis to wake up one day and find out that the Smith family got tired of all that humidity in Atlanta and wanted something a little closer to Hawaii.

Ray Ratto, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.