As a kid, one of my favorite Super Bowl features was the annual discussion of which Super Bowl team fans of the other 30 teams should support. In other words: sorry, Jaguars fans, your season ended weeks ago, so cheer for Team X in the championship.

Sam Riche | MCT

The reasons could range from the obvious—hey Jets fans, you should probably root against the Patriots!—to the inane—hey Lions fans, one of the Seahawks’ assistant defensive coaches started six games for your 2-14 squad in 2009, so you should cheer for his charges’ demise at Tom Brady’s hands.

In this year’s Super Bowl, of course, the two teams are so generally loathed that it’s more a question of which team to root against than which to pull for. For Rams fans, it might seem on first instinct to root against the division rival Seahawks, who have bested the Rams in the NFC West standings for 11 consecutive years.

But on second thought, St. Louisans, the Patriots are the enemy this year; Boston teams have so battered their St. Louis counterparts in recent years that everyone in our area should be rooting against the Patriots come Sunday.

First, take St. Louis’ crown jewel of a sports team, the Cardinals. Twice in the last decade, Boston squared off against St. Louis in the World Series, and twice Boston emerged with the trophy. I was at Games 4 and 5 in 2013—what could have been a Cardinals celebration instead became a Boston beatdown, with the Red Sox silencing the Busch Stadium crowd on consecutive nights en route to winning the series.

Go back a little further and you’ll find that the Patriots stole a Super Bowl title from the Rams, effectively turning out the lights on the Greatest Show on Turf. After Adam Vinatieri’s game-winner split the uprights, Kurt Warner never won another game with St. Louis—while the Patriots debuted their dynasty.

Or go back even further, to the last time an NBA team graced the St. Louis hardwood. The St. Louis Hawks sported five future Hall of Famers in 1957 and reached the NBA Finals without losing a game in the early playoff rounds. But that year’s Celtics squad had a whopping seven future Hall of Famers, and Boston squeaked out a 125-123 double-overtime victory in Game 7 for its first ever title.

Three more times in the next four years the two basketball powers would square off, and the Celtics won twice more, including 1961, the last time the Hawks would reach the Finals before leaving St. Louis for good. Boston, meanwhile, won 11 championships in 13 years.

Or think about how even the Blues—a team that hasn’t made the Stanley Cup Finals, and therefore hasn’t even been able to play Boston in the playoffs, for 45 years—were beaten by Boston. In the Blues’ finals run in 1970, the Bruins put a swift end to the upstart Blues, sweeping the series. The pattern holds: the Blues haven’t retuned to the finals since.

What’s the point of this history lesson? First, that St. Louis teams (save the Cardinals) haven’t given this city much to cheer about since, oh, the Nixon administration—in other words, since before appending “-gate” to a word like, say, “deflate” was in vogue.

And second, that this city should become the 13th Man in support of Seattle on Sunday. And that’s before even beginning to consider how the Patriots probably spied on the Rams in their fateful Super Bowl win or how it would be great to think of the Rams, who upset Seattle in October, as one of the only teams to beat the Super Bowl champion this year.

So throw on that neon blue and green and snack on some Skittles. It’s time to repeat a mantra I wrote in this space before the 2013 World Series: anybody but Boston.