CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One of the most infamous dropped passes in football history clanged off Dallas Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith as he lay in the end zone during Super Bowl XIII.

Poor Smith. Forty years ago, he had only his bare hands to try to pull in Roger Staubach’s low pass. Had he played in a more recent edition of the N.F.L. playoffs, he almost certainly would have been wearing a pair of the sticky, silicone gloves that have transformed receivers’ mitts into virtual Spider-Man hands.

The technological advances on the skin of those gloves have been so profound that they now enable receivers to snare passes their forebears never dreamed of catching, and in making the seemingly impossible possible, they may be changing the way football is played.

The grippy polymer used on the new generation of gloves, said to be developed first by a Canadian wide receiver and a chemist in a Pakistan laboratory in 1999, is about 20 percent stickier than a human hand — according to a recent study by the M.I.T. Sports Lab performed at the request of The New York Times.