Photo

Steve Young led the San Francisco 49ers to a Super Bowl victory over the San Diego Chargers in 1995, throwing a record-setting six touchdown passes. He was the most valuable player of the game, and of the season. He was a seven-time Pro Bowler, a three-time All-Pro and, in 2005, inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The unbelievable pressure about to be placed on Colin Kaepernick, the 49ers’ young quarterback, who has guided the team to its first Super Bowl appearance since Young did, comes from the team’s fans, who consider Young’s storied career as mildly disappointing because he won only once as a starter.

One of the lasting images of that 1995 Super Bowl victory was Gary Plummer, a San Francisco linebacker, helping pull an invisible monkey off Young’s back while the team celebrated. The gesture was a testament to the expectations placed on San Francisco since shortly after Joe Montana arrived from Notre Dame in 1979. The 49ers won four Super Bowls with Montana at quarterback and soon, as with the Yankees in baseball, any season ending without a championship became a disappointment.

The pressure comes largely from the fans but also from ownership.

“We’ve come full circle,” Denise DeBartolo York, who along with her husband, John York, owns the team, told reporters after the 49ers’ 28-24 victory on Sunday over the Atlanta Falcons. “The dynasty will prevail.”

To simply win the Super Bowl, however, may not be enough to appease long-waiting 49ers fans. To live up to the legacy forged by Montana and Young, Kaepernick will have to win perfectly.

In five trips to the Super Bowl, the 49ers are 5-0. Of franchises with more than two Super Bowl victories, they hold the only untarnished record. Montana and Young combined to throw 17 touchdown passes in the five games, and neither threw an interception. Montana’s quarterback rating of 100.0 in Super Bowl XVI represents the team’s low point.

The pair even set a precedent for the speedy Kaepernick, in terms of rushing, with Montana’s 59 yards on the ground in Super Bowl XIX representing the highest total by a quarterback in a Super Bowl victory and Young’s 49 in Super Bowl XXIX second on the list.

It has not been only the 49ers’ quarterbacks who have excelled in the Super Bowl. In five games the 49ers have outscored their Super Bowl opponents, 188-89. They have taken things up a notch in the last two games, winning by a combined score of 104-36.

While a long, fallow period after Young’s retirement, marked by an ownership change from Eddie DeBartolo to his sister, a carousel of quarterbacks and salary-cap issues that occasionally made the national deficit seem reasonable, 49ers fans largely held to the belief that their team should not just be winning, but winning Super Bowls.

When Kaepernick, a dynamic thrower and passer, took over the starting job from the injured Alex Smith in Week 9, it seemed the offense had finally found the dynamic factor it had been looking for to match the team’s overwhelming defense.

The combination led San Francisco to a comeback win over Atlanta in the N.F.C. championship game and a date with Baltimore in the Super Bowl.

Kaepernick may differ from his famous predecessors in terms of size, but his cool demeanor on the field harks back to the famous story of Montana’s taking the time to point out the comedian John Candy in the crowd before driving for the winning touchdown in the final minute of the Super Bowl in 1989. In both playoff wins this season the 49ers had an early deficit, but Kaepernick, in his second year, calmly pushed his teammates to stay in the game.

“He just competes like a maniac all the time,” Coach Jim Harbaugh, who selected Kaepernick in the second round last season, told reporters. “It’s always the same when I’m looking in through the face mask.”

In the Superdome in New Orleans, the same stadium in which Montana led San Francisco to a 55-10 thrashing of the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl in 1990, Kaepernick will have the world watching while he tries to reawaken the 49ers’ long-dormant dynasty. His margin for error, for better or worse, is zero.