This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Super Bowl exists because of a truce between two rival football leagues, not a single league's championship plan. The National Football League and the American Football League, after years of competing for players and fans, agreed in 1966 to merge into a single league by 1970, and to hold a championship game between each league's own champion in the interim. The first such game, played in January 1967 between the NFL's Green Bay Packers and the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs, was billed at the time as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, a name with none of the branding the event would later carry.
The name Super Bowl is widely credited to Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, who is said to have taken it from his children's Super Ball, a popular high-bouncing toy of the era; the league adopted the name officially only from the third game onward, then applied it retroactively to the first two using Roman numerals, a numbering convention, Super Bowl I, Super Bowl II and onward, that the league has kept ever since even as it has become an outlier among major American sporting trophies and titles. The championship trophy itself was named for Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, who won the first two games, after his death in 1970, permanently attaching his name to the league's ultimate prize.