So, we lived to see it. The National Football League is returning to Los Angeles.

One or two of three teams apparently will be headed for greater L.A. by the end of Wednesday

The concern now?

The NFL will contrive a way to mess this up.

It is ironic, of course — laughable, too — that a city not worthy of an NFL team for the previous 21 years now has three franchises queued up and ready to jump to Greater L.A:

The Rams, Chargers and Raiders.

The NFL has two options that make good sense. They have one which does not. And I have been following the NFL long enough to have a healthy fear that they they will choose the latter.

The options that work:

–The Rams go to Inglewood, where a $1.9 billion stadium will be built, with private money, at the site of the shuttered Hollywood Park.

–The Rams and Chargers go to Inglewood, sharing the stadium.

The option that does not work:

–The Chargers and Raiders go to Carson, where a $1.7 million stadium would be built, with private money, for them to share.

Why do I fear the latter?

Another list of points:

–In the Los Angeles market, the Rams are the most attractive of the three teams, and it isn’t close. They played in the L.A. market from 1946 through 1994, and most any Angeleno over the age of 30 remembers that quite well. It could be argued that the Rams were the biggest sports story in Greater L.A. for long stretches of time, during that period.

The other day, fans held a “Bring Back the Rams” rally at the Los Angeles Coliseum — see the photo at the link, above.

No rallies for the other two teams.

–If we were going to designate a “next-most-appealing” team, it would be the Chargers. They played in Los Angeles one season, in the early 1960s, but that isn’t what gives them a ready-made fan base — the steady bleed-over of Greater L.A. fans to San Diego during the past 21 seasons is.

The Chargers last week said 25 percent of their tickets are purchased by fans from Orange County, L.A. County and the Inland Empire — all part of the L.A. media market. For those fans, the Chargers moving to Los Angeles simply means an easier commute to see Philip Rivers play.

–The Raiders are the mutt in this dog-and-pony show. Or the pit bull, if you like. Not much to look at, and prone to violence. Their previous tenure here, from 1982 through 1994, was marked by the proliferation of Raiders apparel among local gangs. That silver-and-black stuff. The Raiders actively degraded the community.

All right-thinking NFL fans in the L.A. market do not want the Raiders and their brawling fans to come back. Ever. At all. Even if it means no NFL in the area — and, remember, Los Angeles has not seemed bereft, existing without an NFL team for a generation.

–If we are choosing on the basis of stadium, Inglewood seems to be preferable. The stadium seems to come with more bells and whistles, and more fans could get to an Inglewood stadium more quickly than one located down in Carson.

Till a day or two ago, it looked like this was an either/or vote for NFL owners — the Rams in Inglewood or the Chargers-Raiders duo in Carson.

But the buzz today is that Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is pushing for a Rams-Chargers hookup in Inglewood. The idea is that the Inglewood project is more ambitious and would return with a splash more appropriate to the home of the movie industry.

Also, it solves two of the three stadium problems, and it is being suggested that Rams owner Stan Kroenke would be OK with that.

Others, however, suggest that the owner of the Chargers, Dean Spanos, will refuse to join Kroenke because the former believes the latter snatched the Hollywood Park property out from under him — which complicates matters.

Which takes us back to the Carson deal for the Chargers and Raiders.

The NFL might be tempted to plump for this one because the Raiders have a genuinely awful stadium situation — they still play in the Oakland Coliseum, the only surviving football-and-baseball stadium in the country. Of course, the Raiders walked in to that one, when they returned to Oakland in 1995.

Meanwhile, St. Louis has made a significant offer for a new stadium (or St. Louis considers it a significant offer, anyway; the Rams do not) that easily outdistances the non-offer Oakland has made the Raiders or the heavily qualified offer San Diego has made the Chargers.

And that alarms me, because the NFL always follows the money, and if the Rams have the best offer of government money to build a new stadium … the owners may be tempted to keep the Rams in St. Louis and send Los Angeles the underwhelming Chargers and the ridiculous Raiders.

One would think — and this is the sort of naivete of fans everywhere — that NFL fans in the Greater Los Angeles ought to have some sort of say as to which team is allowed to operate in the market.

They clearly do not.

Which is crazy, but that is how the NFL works.

Thirty-two owners meet in Houston tomorrow and Wednesday, and they will make the call on which teams get to seduce fans for the next X number of years — however long it takes before the new stadiums are old, or before the NFL is banned because of the risks of brain trauma.

The fans want the Rams. I am confident of this. They don’t want the Raiders. The Chargers? Whatever.

Will the NFL pay any heed?

No, it will not. Los Angeles will get what it gets.

If it goes wrong, I suppose L.A. fans can try to ignore the mess.