We are St. Louis, and we are awesome.

They can strip away our NFL team, they can scoff at our efforts to build a new NFL stadium, but they can’t snatch our confidence because, right here, right now, we will harness it, we will cradle it and we will carry it into the next year and years, because we are St. Louis, and we are awesome.

This is our moment. We can control and define our post-Rams postmortem today, right now. Yes, we are worn down by the Rams’ decision to move. It all feels emasculating, we can’t deny this reality. But it’s all about how we react from it, and how we mentally approach our posts — be it as fans or politicians or corporate executives or forward-thinkers – both in our sports community and, really, in our whole community. We need to rise and galvanize; we cannot fall into the trap of thinking we’re less than we are, just because we got dumped.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience,” Martin Luther King Jr. said, “but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”