GLENN DICKEY

WHEN THE gaudy statistics and great wins fade from memory, what I'll remember most about Steve Young will be his passion for the game and his courage.

Young practiced with gusto, and he played as hard in exhibition games as he did in the Super Bowl. On one memorable play in an exhibition game against San Diego, he continued running with the ball even after his helmet had been knocked off.

``He didn't just love the game,'' said 49er coach Steve Mariucci. ``He loved practicing, he loved being with the guys in the locker room, the camaraderie. He loved everything.''

Amazingly, he even liked the media. ``I realized you were one ring of the circus and we were under the same tent,'' he said at yesterday's press conference. After the formal gathering was finished, he took a handful of writers into a smaller room to tell us how much he appreciated our work, after which he answered any further questions we had. A class act.

Young's finest game was Super Bowl XXIX after the 1994 season, when he led a 49-26 rout of the San Diego Chargers with a record six touchdown passes, but his defining moment was probably the great run he made to defeat the Minnesota Vikings in a 1988 game.

The Vikings had upset the 49ers in the playoffs the previous year, which caused a rift between owner Eddie DeBartolo and coach Bill Walsh that didn't close for years.

With the Vikings leading the '88 game, Young was seemingly trapped behind the line of scrimmage. Somehow, he squirmed loose and started running downfield. As he weaved back and forth, virtually every Vikings defender had a shot at him, and some had more than one. None could bring him down, and the exhausted Young finally flopped into the end zone for the score. Officially, it was a 49-yard run; he had run at least 20 yards farther.

``After all the graceful moments, it's something that my defining moment as a player was a flop,'' he said, wryly.

But that play was what Young was all about as a player. He never gave up, never conceded. When George Seifert took him out in the third quarter of a 1994 game against Philadelphia which the 49ers would lose, 40-8, Young screamed at Seifert on the sideline. Young wanted to keep playing, to keep trying to come back.

He played football with the zeal of a linebacker, running into and over tacklers even as his coaches were screaming at him to take a quarterback slide or run out of bounds. He always insisted that he was in much more danger in the pocket, where he was vulnerable to unexpected hits, and his words were sadly prophetic -- a sack in the pocket against Arizona last fall was the final play of his career.

It took physical courage to play the way Young did, and it took mental courage to follow Joe Montana.

Though there have been overlapping careers, as with Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin with the Rams in the early '50s, this is the first time one Hall of Fame quarterback has followed another.

The pressure was too much for Danny White following Roger Staubach and Mark Malone following Terry Bradshaw, but not for Young.

The pressure of following a great quarterback is intensified because fans and media remember the departed player only at his best. In Young's case, writers invented a category: ``near interceptions.'' In fact, every quarterback has some passes that should be intercepted and others that bounce off a receiver's hands. It evens out, as it did for Young, who had more than twice as many career touchdowns as interceptions, the best mark in NFL history.

``Having Steve Young there made it possible for the 49ers to go from the '80s to the '90s,'' said former 49ers club president Carmen Policy yesterday. ``When you see great teams collapse, it's almost always because they lost their quarterback. But we had Steve ready to go.''

``I would have preferred to be the first in the line,'' Young said, laughing. ``Let Joe be the one to face the pressure.''

Policy said that he thought the pressure of following Montana probably brought out the best in Young. ``He might not have reached the level he did if he hadn't been tested that way.''

In a conversation we had last year, Young said much the same thing. ``It wasn't easy for me to watch from the sidelines, and it wasn't easy to follow Joe. He raised the bar. I'd watch him and say, `Wow!' When I got my chance, I knew I really had to do my best to meet that standard.''

Because Young was such an outstanding runner, his passing ability was often underrated. There was a comparison the other day with Ken Stabler, to Young's detriment. As one who watched both quarterbacks many times, there's no comparison. Young was a much superior long passer and even more accurate than Stabler. Young set the NCAA season mark for completion percentage, 71.3, and holds the 49ers' team record, 70.2.

He would have been a great single-wing tailback, with his dual abilities. But he was also a great quarterback.

That point seems better understood by observers from other areas than by observers from this one, where the fondness for Montana overwhelms objective views of Young.

Dan Pompei, who covers pro football for the Sporting News, wrote last week that a case could be made for Young as the best quarterback ever.

Bob Oates, who has written about pro football for half a century, makes the same argument, in his just-published book, ``Football In America: The Game of the Century,'' Oates notes that when Montana played, the 49ers were the only ones running the Walsh offense, which made it difficult to defense them. By the time Young was the starter, so many teams were using variations of the offense that teams had learned how to defend against it.

Statistically, Young out-did Montana in all the significant individual categories. But football is a team game. Bradshaw has four Super Bowl rings primarily because he played on a team with a great defense. The 49ers in Montana's era also had great defenses, and he has four Super Bowl rings. Young only once played on a team with a great defense, and he set records in that Super Bowl season.

He'll be missed. His physical skills made Young a great quarterback. When you factor in his passion for the game, he became a player who is truly irreplaceable.