Bay watch: Tide shifts to Raiders; After years of having a championship-caliber NFL team in San Francisco, Northern California's fans turn their attention to Oakland.(Chicago Tribune)

The cities face each other across the San Francisco Bay, at times glowering across class lines as much as the body of water separating them.

Oakland, the blue-collar, Blue Ribbon town about which author Gertrude Stein once remarked, "The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there is no there there," to which columnist by Herb Caen amended, "The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, it's there."

San Francisco, the white-collar, white wine town to which residents simply refer pretentiously to as "The City" but which writer Ambrose Bierce preferred to think of as "that moral penal colony of the world."

Their football teams …