Brown’s elation at winning three postseason games to start his career is not like, say, Joe Namath’s, in recalling winning Super Bowl III. Brown won two more bowls with the Rams, including a 31-0 stomping of the Dallas Cowboys in 1970, the finale for the game.

Brown was happy to beat America’s Team. Who wasn’t? But playing in those meaningless games that were more like exhibitions, he said, was like having “the worst inferiority complex.”

It is strange to contemplate that from 1961 to 1970, Commissioner Pete Rozelle’s rising pigskin-industrial complex celebrated something that screamed out, “We’re No. 3!”

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But it staged the consolation game every year at the Orange Bowl in Miami — all but one played after the N.F.L. championship game, the acme of achievement in the league until Super Bowl I in 1967.

The runner-up games benefited the players’ pension fund, but they also got a few hundred to just over a thousand dollars for the junket to Florida.

“We barely had enough for expenses,” said Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel, who won the 1968 and ’70 Playoff Bowls in routs. In the days before those games, he said, the disciplinarian Rams Coach George Allen “let us run wild in Miami, but we played loose and won.”

This was the N.F.L. before it started the Super Bowl and initiated multiple rounds of playoffs. Wild cards were for poker, not the postseason.

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“It was sort of a fluff game,” said Frank Ryan, the Cleveland Browns quarterback who led his team to the 1964 N.F.L. championship but lost two Runner-Up Bowls.

“That ridiculous game shows how ridiculous the league was in those days,” he said.

At gatherings with teammates, do they reminisce about it?

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“It never comes up,” Ryan said.

The Green Bay Packers sandwiched two Playoff Bowls between N.F.L. titles in 1961 and ’62 and three more championships from ’65 to ’67. Coach Vince Lombardi hated being crowned the league’s best loser when the Packers beat the Browns in 1964 and hated it even more when his boys lost to the St. Louis Cardinals the next year, 24-17. In “Lombardi,” the Broadway play, he called the game “the Toilet Bowl,” a cleaned-up version of what he really said.

After losing to St. Louis, he raged about a “hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players.”

He added, “That’s all second place is — hinky-dink.”

Tom Matte, a Baltimore Colts halfback, said the 1966 game meant something. The Colts had lost the final game of the season in sudden death to Green Bay and a chance to play for the N.F.L. title. The Packers had tied that game in regulation on a disputed field goal.

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So the Colts felt the pressure to show that they deserved better — and had to play Matte at quarterback because of injuries to Johnny Unitas and Gary Cuozzo.

“Shula said we’ll go down and have fun,” Matte said. “We had no curfew, we drank a lot of beer and Don Meredith shot his mouth off.”

The Colts beat the Cowboys, 35-3, with Matte throwing two touchdown passes.

And it was not all hinky-dink on the field, Matte said.

“I’d done a bootleg,” he said, “and LeRoy Jordan came in late and really nailed me so I took a swing at him. I think I got a penalty and Tommy Bell walks me back to the huddle and said, ‘You’re the only quarterback they’ve got, and if you do that again, I’ll have to throw you out.’ ”

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Brown said an incident off the field before the 1961 game was more critical to him than anything that happened in his less-than-storied five victories. Several white players were upset that Brown and two other black players — Dick Lane, known as Night Train, and Danny Lewis — had to stay in a “dinky” hotel away from their teammates.

“After practice one day, Gibbons, Pietrosante and Cassady talked to George Wilson,” Brown said, referring to Jim Gibbons, Nick Pietrosante and Howard Cassady. “They said, ‘We’re all going to go home because we came down here as a team, we’ll stay as a team and play as a team.’ ” Wilson, the coach, agreed and moved Brown, Lane and Lewis to the Ivanhoe Hotel on Miami Beach. “That meant something,” Brown said.

Gabriel said that his two Playoff Bowl victories had some meaning — at least to Allen, who saw them as the first game of the next season. They were empty wins, but Gabriel said that they were more meaningful than a game that endures to this day.

“After watching the Pro Bowl last week,” Gabriel said, “wouldn’t you have rather watched the Bears and Jets play?”

Runner-Up Bowl, anyone?