"While Minnesota grinds it out at midfield in its attempt to hold on to the Minnesota Vikings, pro-football-deprived Southern California believes it has the end zone in sight.

With a population five times that of the Twin Cities, the Los Angeles region is finally getting serious about building a football palace and wooing a National Football League team to either a sports-and-entertainment mecca downtown or atop a vacant hillside in the aptly named City of Industry.

It's not time for Minnesotans to panic, but the historical parallels are scary. The downtown site would be privately funded and next to the home of the basketball Lakers, a team Los Angeles snatched a half-century ago -- from Minneapolis.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,'' said Los Angeles City Council Member Jan Perry, whose district would include the downtown stadium and who chairs a city committee negotiating with developers. "Frankly, we just need a team.''

The Vikings do not appear to be L.A.'s top pick. The likeliest target appears to be the San Diego Chargers, a team long unhappy with its obsolete stadium. "It's theirs to lose,'' said John Ireland, a plugged-in sports talk host at 710 ESPN.

"It would be incredibly weird, that the Lakers came from Minneapolis, and then if the Vikings came, we'd have two teams named the Lakers and the Vikings,'' Ireland said. "We have no lakes and no Scandinavians -- except all the blonde models who have moved to Hollywood to try to become actors.''

But the Vikings have talked with developers for the Los Angeles and Industry sites. The team is without a lease as of January, and the road to a new, publicly subsidized stadium in Minnesota has been fraught with tough politics, regional conflicts and severe budget constraints.

Southern California's plans are coming together now, after 15 years of ill-fated attempts, only because state and local taxes are finally off the table. The region is home to two National Hockey League teams, two Major League Baseball teams and two National Basketball Association teams. It once had two NFL teams but lost both in the mid-1990s, when the Rams decamped to St. Louis and the Raiders commuted back to Oakland.

That has left 12 million people in the metro area and 6 million in outlying counties without local pro football. "Whoever comes here is just going to be printing money," Ireland said."