NBC and CBS each paid $1 million for the privilege, selling commercials for $70,000 to $85,000 per minute; they hawked 10-cent Muriel cigars and McDonald’s hamburgers (“Over Two Billion Sold”). CBS tried to draw viewers by preceding its Super Bowl coverage with an exhibition by the Harlem Globetrotters.

An estimated 50 million to 60 million Americans watched that first game, foreshadowing the Super Bowl’s commanding place in modern American life, which drove Norman Vincent Peale, the minister and author, to say in 1974, “If Jesus Christ were alive today, he’d be at the Super Bowl.”

The live broadcast of the 1967 game was blacked out on TV stations within 75 miles of Los Angeles, but this did not significantly help ticket sales (the formal price for the most expensive seat was $12). Some local football fans were so furious about the blackout that they deliberately stayed away. Despite Rozelle’s prediction that the Super Bowl would sell out, about a third of the Coliseum’s seats were empty.

The first Super Bowl did not exactly show the incandescence of later halftimes that featured Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. Fans were entertained instead by the trumpeter Al Hirt, the University of Arizona and Grambling College marching bands, 300 pigeons, 10,000 balloons and a flying demonstration by the hydrogen-peroxide-propelled Bell Rocket Air Men.

The focus of the game was the Packers’ renowned Brooklyn-born coach, Vince Lombardi, who conceded to the news media that the Super Bowl would be “a big football game” but contended — not very convincingly — that losing “won’t mean the end of the world.”

Behind the scenes, the usually nerveless Lombardi, who had led the Packers to three championships in five previous seasons, was chafing under the pressure he felt to demonstrate the N.F.L.’s superiority over the A.F.L. upstarts.

Lombardi’s standout quarterback, Bart Starr, said the “main problem” was that his team had never faced the Chiefs; thus there was “no basis for true comparison.” Starr felt that Lombardi “wanted to win this game very, very badly, and treated it like a personal mission.”