Even Green Bay Packers fans born decades after the 1967 NFL Championship Game can recite facts about the "Ice Bowl," which has attained near-mythic status as the pinnacle victory of the 1960s Packers.
The game featured unthinkable cold, a back-and-forth struggle between Vince Lombardi's proud but aging Packers and the upstart Dallas Cowboys and, of course, Bart Starr's heroic game-winning plunge _ the most famous play in franchise history then and now.
Grainy film footage of players slipping on the icy Lambeau Field turf and the Packers' determined final drive, paired with the dulcet tones of NFL Films narrator John Facenda, helped turn the 21-17 victory into a romanticized symbol of Lombardi's dynasty.
Three hundred sixty-four days earlier, however, those same two teams _ in fact, better versions of those teams _ engaged in an epic battle that was every bit as dramatic and at least as important as the Ice Bowl.
Sunday will mark the 50th anniversary of the 1966 NFL Championship Game, which was played Jan. 1, 1967, before a sellout crowd of 74,152 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas and broadcast to a national television audience by CBS.
Though Green Bay won, 34-27, behind an all-time great performance by Starr, it's safe to say most modern-day Packers fans know little, if anything, about the game.
"I tell people if you want to analyze all the great games in NFL history, you have to include that game in the Cotton Bowl," said Bob Long, then a third-year wide receiver with the Packers. "(Linebacker) Dave Robinson and I get together all the time and we talk about that game.
"That was one game that I really think back upon. The fans might not talk about it much but the players still do, I can tell you that. We remember."
