At some point Sunday night, after a full day of NFL games conclude and the leftover wings and brats are wrapped up tightly and tucked away in the refrigerator and the barbecue grills are scrubbed clean and neatly covered, a whole bunch of tired heads will hit a whole bunch of pillows across Los Angeles.

What happens next — whether sleep arrives rapidly and happily and satisfied for Rams fans, or it is prolonged, anxious and concerned — will rely heavily on how a certain second-year quarterback plays Sunday afternoon against the Indianapolis Colts.

It’s not like all the angst and optimism and worry and confidence and doubt and conviction about Jared Goff will be validated or invalidated.

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Meet this week’s Rams opponent: Indianapolis Colts It will take much more than the opening game of a new season to fairly arbitrate the varying degrees of credence or apprehension about Goff, the polarizing first overall pick in the 2016 draft whose disastrous rookie season was either the fault of the impossible situation the Rams put him in or damning evidence he was miscast as the future face of the franchise.

We likely won’t won’t be anointing him the next big thing or kicking him entirely to the curb based on one game, either.

A season opener at that.

But deep down in our football souls, a place where the lasting snapshots of the greats, the average and the busts among the hundreds of NFL quarterbacks that preceded Goff impartially reside, we’ll have a much better idea where all this is headed.

The direction of which will define the Rams’ second year back in Los Angeles and the immediate future that follows.

Goff, to his credit, seems eager to embrace the challenge. And it would be disingenuous to claim he hasn’t provided snippets of evidence he is much further along now than at any point last year.

Aside from an All-Pro caliber play by Chargers pass-rush demon Joey Bosa to strip sack Goff and force a 76-yard touchdown fumble recovery and one very lousy overthrow by Goff for an interception, the former Cal star was mostly effective during the preseason while completing 24 of 32 passes for 250 yards and a touchdown. Of the first six drives he presided over, he directed the Rams to scores on four of them, connecting on 75 percent of his passes.

Throughout OTAs and training camp, he looked much further along this year compared to last.

This isn’t the overwhelmed Goff we saw last preseason, the one who didn’t make the active roster for the season opener and then sat nine weeks before finally getting his chance to play. He looks, acts and, at least through most of the preseason, has played the part of a productive NFL quarterback.

“I feel confident compared to last year,” Goff said. “I think that obviously getting all the reps through the offseason has been huge and understanding what we’re trying to do and like I just kind of said, understanding so much more about the game and about what everyone’s intent is on the field. Ultimately, just comfortability and just being where I want to be mentally, physically, emotionally, everything.”

He needs to be.

There is an incredible amount riding on his performance.

Forget the Aaron Donald holdout.

Or the beginning of the new era of Rams football under first-year coach Sean McVay.

Set aside the Fight for L.A. slogan pinning the Rams against the Chargers, their new Los Angeles neighbors by way of San Diego. It’ll be years before the winner of that battle is truly calculated.

It’s not about wins and losses, per se, or attendance figures and television ratings.

The 2017 season is all about Jared Goff and whether he proves he’s the quarterback the Rams can confidently march into the future with or a miscalculation they need to move on from.

If that sounds hasty and harsh, well, that’s how it goes when it comes to the NFL and quarterbacks.

You’re in business when you’ve got a real one.

You’re lost with a pretender.

You are relevant with a very good to great one.

You’re just a faceless team in the crowd with just an OK one.

The Rams have been lost for years, sorting through one would-be permanent quarterback after another, and their relevancy as a bona fide NFL franchise, a team opponents fear and fans flock to, has steadily dwindled.

It was glaring problem in St. Louis, where they stumbled through 13 straight non-winning seasons before packing up and moving back to Los Angeles.

But it was regionally confined, given the market they played in.

The stage in Los Angeles offers no shade, no place to hide or retreat. You spin your wheels here, you might as well be pedaling backward off the side of a mountain. That’s no way to rekindle a romance in a new city, especially with the Chargers moving into town and vying for the attention and hearts and wallets from many of the same fans the Rams are wooing.

But until they get their long-term quarterback situation solved, that’s exactly what they’ll be doing.

Beginning at 1 p.m. Sunday, we’ll start getting a better idea if those wheels finally found some traction.

“I think anytime that you get guys in the games, that’s where you get a chance to really evaluate them,” McVay said. “I think we’ve been really pleased with what we’ve seen in practice – the pocket movement, the ability to work through progressions. The best test is when you can truly get tackled and I think in spurts, he’s showed some really good positive signs of going in the right direction with what he did in the preseason. ”

Everything the Rams did since last season was to ensure this year provides a fair representation of what they actually have in Goff. Not the finished product, necessarily, but frank, valid proof he’s their guy.

They fired defensive-minded coach Jeff Fisher and replaced him with McVay, a 31-year-old offensive prodigy who has surrounded himself with assistants heavy on offensive design and quarterback development experience.

They replaced Greg Robinson, the worst left tackle in the NFL, with Andrew Whitworth, one of the best.

Robert Woods, Sammy Watkins and Cooper Kupp were added at wide receiver, transforming one of the least dangerous groups in all of football into one opposing defenses now have to respect.

From coaching to personnel, you can make the case almost everything around Goff has been improved.

The bad coaching and even worse talent around Goff last year rendered judgment on him unfair. As bad as the numbers were – an 0-7 record, 112 of 205 passing with seven interceptions and five touchdowns and an incredible 26 sacks – it was much more the by-product of poor coaching and insufficient talent. In many ways, Goff was just a victim of circumstance.

But the Rams have removed that crutch, making this season a much more reasonable microscope from which to dissect Goff. Even he notices a major difference.

“I think as a whole we’ve really improved everywhere – not only offensively, but defensively, special teams, everywhere we’ve improved. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say we feel really good where we’re at.”

The question is, will a bunch of anxious Rams fans feel just as good when their heads hit the pillows Sunday night?