Fifty years ago, when it was still a modest spectacle watched on a single medium, played by a single gender, contested exclusively between teams from the US, and largely ignored by most of planet Earth, Super Bowl 50 was nevertheless called a “world championship” by the National Football League, whose very name betrayed a parochial, one-nation interest in what the rest of the world knew—if they knew it at all—as “American football.”
That was 2016, when the NFL was a quaint pastime played for relatively low stakes and officiated by human beings who flipped a coin to start every game, used a physical length of chain to measure a first down, blew a whistle to halt play, and threw a yellow handkerchief to signal a penalty. So primitive was the technology of that benighted age—typing with opposable thumbs was our principal form of communication—that NFL players literally practiced against stuffed dummies.
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