By Terry Golway

As you may have heard, the Giants will be playing in their fifth Super Bowl this evening in Indianapolis. If they win, they’ll capture their fourth championship, tying the Green Bay Packers with the fourth-most titles in history. (The Pittsburgh Steelers have six Super Bowl titles, while the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers have five apiece.)

Yes, this would be a wonderful achievement, putting the Giants in some pretty heady company. There’s just one problem: It’s all wrong.

If the Giants win tonight, they’ll be celebrating the team’s eighth NFL championship. And, for the record, today marks the 19th time the Giants have played for the championship of American football — the most ever.

In their collective wisdom, the National Football League and the sports media have decided that the only championships worth remembering are those won since the first Super Bowl, in 1967. All the records, players and teams associated with the championship of the NFL before 1967 have been virtually erased from the football memory bank. This year’s Super Bowl media guide, for example, notes that four players share the record for most receptions, 11, in a Super Bowl. But Raymond Berry of the Baltimore Colts caught 12 passes in the 1958 NFL Championship Game against the Giants. If Victor Cruz or some other receiver catches 12 tonight, chances are that Berry’s achievement will be ignored.

No other major team sport in the United States does such a disservice to its history. Imagine if Major League Baseball kept a separate list of World Series champions only since divisional play began in 1969. Imagine the NBA celebrating the titles won only after the NBA-ABA merger in 1976. Imagine if the National Hockey League ignored Stanley Cup champions before 1967, when the NHL expanded from six teams to 12.

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All four major team sports in the United States underwent historic expansions in the 1960s and ’70s, but only the NFL — aided and abetted by the sports media — decided to do a major rewrite of its history, casting into oblivion some of its greatest champions, players and games.

The result is a distortion of the sport’s rich history. Today’s football fans know all about the dominance of Super Bowl teams such as the Steelers, Cowboys and 49ers. But what of the great Cleveland Browns of the early 1950s, who appeared in six straight NFL Championship Games from 1950 to 1955, winning three of them with such stars as quarterback Otto Graham, fullback Marion Motley and tackle/kicker Lou Groza — Hall of Famers all?

Even the fabled Packers have fallen victim to the NFL’s revisionist championship history. Yes, they’ve won the Super Bowl four times, but that doesn’t begin to tell the story of their greatness: Green Bay won the NFL championship nine times before the Super Bowl era, including three of the last five championships before Super Bowl I.

Last week, the media pointed out that if Patriots coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady win tonight, they’ll tie Steelers coach Chuck Noll and quarterback Terry Bradshaw for the most Super Bowl titles for a coach and quarterback tandem with four. But what about coach George Halas and quarterback Sid Luckman of the Chicago Bears, who won four NFL titles together in the 1940s? And, more to the point, what about Lombardi and Bart Starr, who won five NFL titles in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls?

There was lots of talk of Belichick’s place in NFL lore in coverage this past week. The Patriots coach is hoping to win his fourth title tonight, which would tie him with Noll for the most championships by a coach “in history.” Two of the NFL’s founding fathers, Halas of the Bears and Curly Lambeau of the Packers, coached their teams to six NFL titles apiece long before anybody thought to rebrand the NFL title game as the Super Bowl. But they’re not included in a “history” that begins in 1967.

The football world’s callous disregard for pre-Super Bowl champions distorts the kind of great arguments that make sports talk such a wonderful guilty pleasure. For example, several talk show hosts were pointing out last week that Eli Manning is the only quarterback ever to lead the Giants to the Super Bowl twice.

Manning’s accomplishment is great, but does it make him the Giants’ greatest quarterback … ever? Modern fans, raised to believe that the NFL started XLVI years ago, seem to think so. But shouldn’t fans know that another great quarterback, Charlie Conerly, led the Giants to three title games in four years in the 1950s, winning the 1956 championship?

No Yankees fan would dare talk about the greatness of their teams in the late 1990s without acknowledging the great teams of the late 1920s and the 1950s. Part of the allure of sports is their ability to connect the present to the past. Even an individual sport such as tennis, which emphasizes records set after 1968, when national championships were opened to professionals, reveres great players from the distant past. Today’s tennis champions labor in the shadow of those from the pre-Open era, including Bill Tilden, Don Budge and Althea Gibson, the great champion of the 1950s, who died in East Orange in 2003.

Football’s history is no less rich than any other sport’s, but as the league and the media equate “history” with “Super Bowl era,” the great players of pre-1967 championship games — including such Giants as Frank Gifford, Sam Huff and Rosey Grier — have simply disappeared.

The NFL certainly is aware of the power of nostalgia and the sheer fun of comparing the greats of the past with those of the present — but only to a point.

If you were great before 1967, well, tough luck. It’s one thing to be great. But in today’s NFL, if you want to be remembered, you have to be super.

Terry Golway, a former sportswriter, is director of the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy.