IRVING, Tex.

The idea for the New York area hosting an outdoor Super Bowl was hatched nearly four years ago, when the Giants and the Jets agreed to build a new stadium together in the Meadowlands. The Jets’ hopes for an enclosed stadium on the Far West Side of Manhattan had fallen through, even though N.F.L. owners had awarded them a Super Bowl that was conditional on getting the stadium built. So when the teams joined forces, the Jets’ owner, Woody Johnson, brought with him the pie-in-the-sky notion that the game should come to New York, anyway.

John Mara, a Giants co-owner, was not so sure. There had been sentiment for New York hosting a Super Bowl at Giants Stadium shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but that support had withered away. Johnson, though, was relentless, Mara said. Johnson is a relative newcomer to ownership, having owned the Jets for only 10 years, and he is viewed as the less influential owner in the forced marriage between the Giants, one of the N.F.L.’s flagship franchises, and the Jets.

But as he began to ask around the league about the idea, Mara was surprised to find enthusiasm for a game in the New York-New Jersey region. And so on Tuesday, with Mara wearing his father’s 1956 championship game ring for good luck, and with his fellow owners lured by the idea of playing the sport’s biggest game on the nation’s largest stage, the N.F.L. awarded the 2014 Super Bowl to New York-New Jersey, making the New Meadowlands Stadium the host of the first outdoor cold-weather Super Bowl in history.

“Why not,” Johnson said after the vote. “We play every other game in cold weather, rain and snow. Would I want to do it every year? Probably not. But 2014 sounds good.”