The next season, the Colts re-established their dominance by beating the Giants 31-16 for the title. Baseball was still the national pastime, boxing was huge and college football was preferred to the NFL in most of the country.

But people like Hunt recognized that if millions tuned in, there had to be potential.

Bell died during the 1959 season and was succeeded in January 1960 by the 33-year-old Rozelle, schooled in public relations and young enough to recognize the pull of television.

As the AFL formed, and armed itself with a five-year contract from ABC, the NFL staged a pre-emptive strike, establishing an expansion franchise for Dallas in 1960 that eventually forced Hunt’s Dallas Texans to Kansas City, where they became the Chiefs.

That same year, the Chicago Cardinals moved to St. Louis and the next year another NFL beachhead was established in Minnesota. Most important, NBC agreed to pay the NFL $615,000 for rights to televise the championship game for the next two years.

By 1961, three years after the game, there were 22 pro football teams in the two leagues, almost double the dozen of 1958.

What followed were a series of moves designed to make pro football into television’s sport, including an antitrust exemption that allowed a single network to carry a single league. CBS was the carrier of choice for the NFL; ABC and later NBC for the AFL.

Most important was the move by Rozelle with the concurrence of the owners in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, to distribute television revenues evenly to all franchises, making it possible for Green Bay, with Lombardi as the coach, to dominate the NFL for much of the 1960s.

Most of the players drifted away. Gifford, Summerall, Huff and Roosevelt Grier parlayed their fame into media success; Berry, Webster and Schnelker, among others, went into coaching; and Marchetti made millions with a fast food franchise.

Others drifted into obscurity and poverty. Lipscomb was found dead of a drug overdose at age 31 in 1963.

But few of the survivors really connected that 1958 game with the NFL’s growth.

Gifford and Summerall, for example, broadcast more than two dozen Super Bowls between them. “I did many, many big games,” Summerall says now. “I don’t think I ever recalled thinking ’I played in the game that created all this.’ To some extent, I guess it did.”

Also on NBCSports.com Howard: Look at what Agassi is now, not was PFT: Cowboys on rise in our power rankings NCAA FB: Ready for player exodus?  |    Top juniors MLB blog: A look at the top 111 free agents Twitter: Follow us @nbc_sports

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