CHICAGO — The Dodgers are Los Angeles’ most dominant sports franchise.

The Rams are the best run.

In just their second season after Aaron Donald’s retirement, the Rams are heading back to the NFC Championship game.

The lone obstacle that remains between them and the Super Bowl is a Seattle Seahawks team they should have swept in the regular season.

The Rams are the most talented of the four teams that are still playing, their 20-17 overtime victory over the Chicago Bears on Sunday in the Divisional Round of the playoffs was a testament to what their franchise is about.

When other teams were hoarding their draft picks, the Rams traded theirs for established players and won a Super Bowl in 2022.

When other teams started doing what they used to do, the Rams reversed course and started rebuilding their team through the draft.

They’re now one win from their third Super Bowl appearance in eight years, two wins from their second Super Bowl championship in five.

Unlike the Dodgers, the Rams don’t have a Shohei Ohtani on their roster printing money for them. Unlike the Dodgers, the Rams don’t have a massive local television contract that provides them with a financial edge over their rivals.

Credit coach Sean McVay. Credit general manager Les Snead. Credit president Kevin Demoff.

They refused to be overly dependent on a proven approach. They ventured into the unknown and reinvented themselves.

Their victory over the Bears was a result of that.

On a freezing-cold night when McVay acknowledged his high-scoring offense was slowed by his “bad coaching,” the Rams were kept in the game by their defense.

That defense was built in the draft.

Byron Young and Kobie Turner were picked in 2023. (Star receiver Puka Nacua was a fifth-round selection in that draft.) Jared Verse and Braden Fiske came a year later.

“I thought our defense came up time in and time out tonight,” McVay said.

The Rams couldn’t move the ball after scoring a touchdown on their first drive, but they went into halftime tied 10-10. They didn’t score again until the fourth quarter, but they never let the Bears take the lead in the second half. They didn’t score the first time they had the ball in overtime, but they were given another chance that led to Harrison Mevis’ 42-yard game-winning field goal.

“I think we’ve done a good job of being able to acquire a bunch of different [players] using the different avenues that you can use to be able to acquire players,” McVay said. “But it’s about the people.”

In particular, he said, it was about identifying the kind of players who could win the kind of game the Rams played against the Bears — a game in which the Rams were winning until quarterback Caleb Williams made a Superman throw on a fourth-down play to level the game at 17-17 with 18 seconds to play.

Returning to this point required a measure of courage from the organization.

The Rams’ victory over the Cincinnati Bengals in the 2022 Super Bowl was followed by a 5-12 season.

In the offseason that followed, Demoff emailed the team’s season ticket holders to explain how the franchise would be taking a new approach to team building.

Demoff wrote how the Rams would “focus on replenishing our draft capital and improving our long-term salary cap situation, clearing the way for us to compete both now and in the future.”

How could they compete now by trading Jalen Ramsey and Allen Robinson, by releasing Leonard Floyd and Bobby Wagner? To many, including me, it sounded as if the Rams were punting on the season.

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, I described Demoff’s words as “nonsense.”

“The Rams won’t publicly use the R-word,” I wrote, “but just two years after their Super Bowl triumph on their home field, they’re rebuilding.”

Turned out Demoff wasn’t making a cynical sales pitch to his most devoted customers.

The Rams made the playoffs that year, and the year after, and again this year.

Nothing has slowed them down, not even Donald’s retirement after the 2023 season. There were concerns that Young or Turner might not be as effective without Donald taking up multiple blockers on every down, but that hasn’t been the case. The Rams are making up for Donald’s individual destructive force with numbers.

As differently as they’re doing things now, the Rams could very well end up in the same place as before.