Before reviewing one of the greatest hoaxes in sports history, let’s first meet the perpetrators: Morris Newburger, Lew Krupnick and Bink Dannenbaum.

Mr. Newburger was a senior partner at the Wall Street brokerage firm Newburger, Loeb & Company. Two of his passions were sports and pranks. One time, for a friend’s birthday party, Mr. Newburger sent 12 trained seals. Another time, when his wife, a Manhattan socialite, was having a dinner party, he had a telegram delivered: “If you ever invite these people to my house again, don’t include me.” It was signed, “Your husband.”

Mr. Newburger’s most inspired move, though, was concocting a fictional college football team — led by an equally fictional running back known as the Celestial Comet — and duping major newspapers (yes, including this one) into writing about it.

“When my father took me to the movies,” said his son Maury Newburger, a Manhattan travel agent, “it was usually to watch old Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy films. That’s when I figured out where he got some of his comical ideas.”