Anyone who has attended a football game at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum knows you might face a long, steep climb to get to where you want to be.

It could be a metaphor for the former St. Louis (and Cleveland) Rams’ return to Los Angeles.

Making the decision to return to the stadium where they played for 34 seasons was the easy part.

Reconnecting with their fans will be a much tougher uphill battle.

The team had a Family Day promotion at the Coliseum today, and approximately 30,000 people turned out to watch a practice session by the returning team.

For some, the notion that the Rams can just roll out a ball and expect the same support they had … well, that isn’t going to happen.

I know one fan who was 11 years old when the Rams abandoned Southern California to move to St. Louis, after the 1994 season.

He figures he gave the team one opportunity to mess with his allegiances, and he will continue to be a fan of the San Diego Chargers — the only NFL team in Southern California from 1995 through 2015.

If many of his generation share those feelings, the Rams already are fighting an uphill battle. Those fans are in their 30s and 40s now, which ought to be the prime age for buying tickets to see the local NFL team play. But not if they are still ticked off at franchise that has moved four times club since 1946.

For the Rams to avoid the embarrassment of empty seats in their (in theory) triumphant return to Los Angeles, they will need to be entertaining from Day 1. They cannot afford to be the serial losers they had been in the final years at St. Louis.

Like New York, Los Angeles loves winners. The Rams have not been one of those lately.

It may help the team that NFL Films has decided to make the Rams the focus of the annual Hard Knocks series — a wall-to-wall look at the team during the preseason, which leads to six HBO mini-documentaries, beginning Tuesday.

It offers a chance for Rams players and coaches to make a positive impression on potential ticket-buyers who may know little or nothing about the team’s personnel.

The team also would do well to accomplish something during the four-week exhibition season, which begins next weekend with a home game against the Dallas Cowboys — who may actually have more fans in the L.A. market than the Rams, at this moment, given their many training camps in Oxnard over the past 50 years.

Yes, of course, the exhibition season is a glorified practice, but a pratfall, even in the non-counting games, could be off-putting.

Another issue that figures to get attention, and which the Rams will want to be on top of from the start, is fan behavior.

Unruliness inside and outside the stadium, which marred the Coliseum tenure of the Los Angeles Raiders, has to be quashed immediately. Even one or two episodes from the first game or two could re-establish the idea that an NFL game in the Coliseum is a bad idea — as it was widely considered before the Raiders crawled back to Oakland.

This is not going to be easy. Los Angeles fans were burned twice by the Rams, first in moving down the freeway to Anaheim in 1980, then in abandoning SoCal entirely 15 years later.

The club needs to be on its best behavior going forward, and a free-to-watch Family Day is a good start.

But it is part of the first steps of what figures to be a slog back to the top of sports franchises in the L.A. market — and to the upper reaches of the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.