When the AFL and NFL agreed that they would merge into a single league in 1971, they also agreed to begin playing a championship game after the 1966 season.

Formally called the AFL-NFL Championship, it was soon nicknamed the Super Bowl. According to one story, a team owner who thought the formal title was--well, too formal--came up with the new name while watching his grandson play with a super ball. That's probably apocryphal. The truth seems to be that some sportswriter invented the tag and it was immediately picked up by others and then by the NFL.

Since the merger, the Super Bowl has been the NFL Championship Game, played between the NFC and AFC champions, who emerge from a round of playoffs.

It's meant to be the climax of the season, but in fact the Super Bowl has all too often been anti-climactic. The average margin of victory has been about 14 points, well above the average for a regular-season NFL game, and there have been a lot of blowouts. The conference championship games have usually been more interesting to watch.

Nevertheless, the game has become a major national event, probably the nation's major sporting event. After two weeks of intensive media hype, it draws millions ot television viewers, many of whom wouldn't think of watching any other football game, and the number of Super Bowl parties is probably surpassed only by the number of New Years Eve parties.

The Super Bowl is the perennial ratings leader among all televised sports events and, on the list of the fifty top-rated TV broadcasts, the game appears twenty times.

The first Super Bowl, though, between the NFL's Green Bay Packers and the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs, wasn't so eagerly anticipated. The main question seemed to be how large Green Bay's margin of victory would be. Tickets cost only $12, and the game still wasn't a sellout.

The Packers won that game, 35-10, and they also won Super Bowl II, 33-14 over the Oakland Raiders. But when Joe Namath guaranteed victory for the AFL's underdog New York Jets in Super Bowl III and then delivered a 16-7 win over the Baltimore Colts, interest rose, especially with the impending merger of the two leagues.

Kansas City's win in Super Bowl IV evened the series between the AFL and NFL. After the merger, the AFC won nine of the next eleven. That record was skewed somewhat, though, by the fact that former NFL teams accounted for five of the victories. Since Super Bowl XVI, after the 1981 season, the NFC had won fifteen of sixteen games, thirteen in a row, before the Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XXXII.

As a result of the playoff system and the Super Bowl, the NFL season now stretches from one year into the next, which can be mildly confusing. The team that wins the 1998 Super Bowl, for example, will be crowned the 1997 NFL champions.

To minimize the confusion, the Super Bowl is referred to by Roman numerals rather than by the year in which it's played. Many sportswriters have criticized that as a pretentious practice. Personally, I don't worry about the pretense, and in the early years it was fairly simple. I do worry about future generations who will have to decipher such monstrosities as Super Bowl DCXLVIII.

Since Super Bowl V, in 1971, the trophy presented to the winning team has been known as the Vince Lombardi Trophy, after the man who coached the Packers to the first two championships. Lombardi died of cancer in September of 1970.