It must've happened sometime after 50 Decembers ago ... when the Baltimore Colts won the 1958 Championship game, the first overtime game in NFL history.

But it must've happened sometime before 40 Super Bowls ago ... when the Baltimore Colts lost Super Bowl III to the Joe Namath Jets.

In the time between those two epic Sundays, those defining moments of the '50s and '60s ... the goalposts -- to use the only fitting analogy -- MOVED.

There are some obvious partial explanations.

Just as Pete Rozelle and the head of CBS Sports, Bill MacPhail, figured out how to make television work, and not, as it had in 1950, cut the L.A. Rams' home attendance by 50 percent ...

Baseball's rituals of October of the '50s and '60s -- the New York Yankees -- dropped off the screens of television viewers for whom Mickey Mantle was The World Series.

At that very time, baseball would take the quick money, by switching its championships to the night -- even the early morning -- even the weeknight early morning ...

The Super Bowl began to become a true cultural phenomonon that will still be over by bedtime tonight for all but the very youngest of you.

And surely we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't acknowledge the impact of time.

Super Bowl I (and nobody even called it that back in 1967) was more or less concurrent with World Series 63! Baseball had all the tradition and the Super Bowl was a kind of confection that NFL fans thought unnecessary and many AFL fans thought unwinnable.

By now ... by Super Bowl XLIII ... the numerical difference might be the same but the sense of reaching back into the past is now almost the same in both sports -- Vince Lombardi is just as much an icon of history as John McGraw or Connie Mack.

But maybe the true explanation for the NFL's growth, the Super Bowl's growth, is hidden in that silly analogy about "moving the goalposts."

Or, in this case, not moving the goalposts. Literally.

As of Jan. 9, 1953, big league baseball had gone exactly half a century without a franchise shift. The New York Yankees had come into existence precisely 50 years earlier -- moved from Baltimore, no less -- and that was it. Generations of fans reached middle age knowing there were 16 ballclubs in 10 cities and they had always been there and they always would be there.

But in pro football, as of Jan. 9, 1953 -- where the teams played? Your guess was as good as anybody else's.

In the first 33 seasons there were 70 different franchises.

Seventy.

There had been Duluth Eskimos and Cleveland Tigers and Chicago Tigers and Detroit Tigers and Brooklyn Tigers and Brooklyn Lions and Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Brickley's Giants and the New New York Giants and the Staten Island Stapletons and the Orange, New Jersey Tornadoes, and the Newark Tornadoes, and thirteen different franchises just in the state of Ohio...

And only once had the sport gone just two consecutive seasons without a franchise change of some sort.

Seventy different franchises ... and 13 of them ... moved!

Nothing symbolized the confusion of the fans of pro football of the time better than this:

The 1951 NFL Champion L.A. Rams had won the title in just their sixth season since moving there ...

And the 1950 NFL Champion Cleveland Browns had won the title ... in their first season in the league.

Trying to follow football meant trying to follow what teams happened to be playing it that year.

That's where the Colts come back into this.

At the apex of baseball's stability, early in 1953, the Colts came into existence, granted the franchise that had gone belly-up as the Dallas Texans the year before. They had moved from New York, where they'd been the Yankees, before that the Bulldogs, before that the Boston Yanks, who had merged with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, who -- well you get the idea.

As the New Baltimore Colts took the field in 1953 nobody could have guessed that the crazy kaleidoscope of professional football, where six of the first nine champions had already gone out of business, would suddenly ... stabilize.

In the next 30 seasons ... only four franchises in the NFL or AFL would move.

At the very same time as NFL teams began to stay long enough in one place for people to appreciate them, baseball spun off its axis.

On March 18, 1953 -- 68 days after baseball reached that half century of continuity -- the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee. Then the St Louis Browns went to Baltimore. The A's to Kansas City. The Dodgers to L.A. The Giants to San Francisco. The Senators to Minnesota. The Braves again to Atlanta. The A's again to Oakland. The Pilots to Milwaukee. The New Senators to Texas. And there were six expansion drafts and fourteen expansion teams and free agency and designated hitters and so much newness that "fake old" -- the retro ballpark and the throw-back uni's -- became a kind of sudden universal plea for the sport to just hold still.

The entire premise of what was traditional and what was impermanent ... had switched, from baseball to football.

From the World Series to the Super Bowl.

Switched so much that -- here they are again -- the Colts are still mourned in Baltimore.

And the fans of the team they got to replace the Colts ... the Browns ... still seethe in Cleveland, even though those Browns had been Cleveland's sixth NFL franchise.

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