And last week, Haupt was angry about another turn in the dispute. CBS backed out of a plan to interview him for a Super Bowl pregame segment that would have used a few minutes from the game. It had agreed to pay him $25,000 and give him two tickets to the Super Bowl. A producer was preparing to watch a restored, digital copy of the game at the Paley Center. A crew was ready to go to Manteo. He was going to tell his story, and perhaps the league would listen.

“It was my right to tell my story, and they were paying me for it,” Haupt said.

But according to his lawyer, Steve Harwood, the deal collapsed when he was told that the N.F.L. had ordered CBS not to pay him.

“They said they’d still put Troy on but couldn’t pay,” Harwood said. “After dealing with the N.F.L. all these years, and with CBS, which screwed up, Troy said he wouldn’t do it for free.”

Brian McCarthy, a league spokesman, denied that the N.F.L. was involved.

“We didn’t tell them not to do it,” he said. “We didn’t talk to CBS about the payment.”

A CBS Sports spokeswoman said only that it chose not to do the feature “because we couldn’t get the appropriate clearances.”

With one click on the computer screen in the Paley Center viewing room, Super Bowl I came back to life. The recording is a relic that shows the signs of exposure to the heat and cold in the attic in Shamokin. Colors fade in and out. The picture is grainy and skips. And it suffers somewhat from Martin Haupt’s decision to stop or pause before most commercial breaks and hitting play when the break ended, which caused him to miss parts of the action when play resumed. The stops and starts give the tapes an occasional herky-jerky feel.

And more important, he did not tape halftime and about half of the third quarter.

“It’s like he thought he would run out of tape,” Troy Haupt said.