KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The last time the Chiefs went to New Orleans for a Super Bowl, Patrick Mahomes’ father hadn’t even been born yet.

The plane back home landed at the yet-to-be-opened first iteration of Kansas City International Airport to dodge the mayhem of a week before. That included, as The Kansas City Star reported, “youths” climbing onto the wings of the plane when the Chiefs returned from Oakland after beating the Raiders in the AFL championship game.

It was all so long ago that, alas, many of those players have died. That poignant fact was reinforced earlier this week when I looked over the 1969 team photo with the great Jan Stenerud: As we went player by player, I realized it would be far easier to name those still alive (including Stenerud’s fellow Pro Football Hall of Famers Bobby Bell, Willie Lanier, Johnny Robinson and Emmitt Thomas) than those we’ve lost.

And it was all so far away that the region still was trying to shed a cowtown portrayal even as Kansas City was catching up to date with the pioneering and dashing franchise embodied in the flamboyant brilliance of coach Hank Stram, son of “The Wrestling Tailor,” and the just-born expansion Royals and the futuristic twin stadiums being built for each.

Only six years earlier when Lamar Hunt was moving the franchise here from Dallas, Len Dawson wondered if he’d find livestock on the streets of the city. And, heck, at the groundbreaking for the Jackson County Sports Complex in 1968, two teenage girls rode up on horses to watch the proceedings.

But even across the half-century plus since then, these current Chiefs have a certain something in common with that team.

‘Fraught with a sense of urgency and gravity’

Not merely because the organization does so much to commemorate that past: from its Hall of Honor to owner Clark Hunt, president Mark Donovan, general manager Brett Veach and coach Andy Reid breaking out the Stram blazer at the last Super Bowl; from honoring Dawson with the choir huddle to Reid running 65 Toss Power Trap last week in tribute to Stram (and naming the in-house production company for the play made famous in Super Bowl IV) and in the way they’ve savored winning the Lamar Hunt Trophy for AFC championships.

But they’re also straddled to that time in another sense.

As these Chiefs seek an unprecedented three-peat in the so-called ultimate game when they take on the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX on Feb. 9 in New Orleans, they share with those ancestors an intense quest to make the sort of history that also advances and uplifts the city itself.

Take it from one who should know: my friend Michael MacCambridge, the author of “America’s Game,” Lamar Hunt’s biography and “ ‘69 Chiefs: A Team, A Season and the Birth of Modern Kansas City.”

While there are notable contrasts along with the parallels, he noted, “both seasons were fraught with a sense of urgency and gravity.”

Because of what was at stake beyond the obvious.

In this case, it’s the chance for the Chiefs to do what no other franchise has managed since the inception of the Super Bowl in the mid-1960s.

It’s a would-be feat so preposterous that it began with longer odds than the 1980 Miracle on Ice, as my colleague Sam McDowell recently calculated. And through a format essentially devised to prevent such a run, with its salary cap and free agency and scheduling.

“It is built to prevent the exact sort of thing we are witnessing,” MacCambridge said.

But Super Bowl IV, just before the dawn in earnest of the AFL-NFL merger, represented something momentous, too.

From ‘Mickey Mouse’ to as good as any NFL team

The end of the era was an opportunity to once-and-for-all legitimize and de-stigmatize the upstart league — a point of enormous meaning to Stram and Hunt, the AFL founder.

Before Stram even had gotten off the field in Los Angeles in 1967 after the Chiefs were humbled, 35-10, by Green Bay in the inaugural Super Bowl, he vowed to avenge that loss.

“I remember him saying to (scout) Lloyd Wells, ‘We’re going to come back, and we’re going to win the Super Bowl,’ ” Stram’s son, Dale, said by phone Thursday.

No doubt that loss burned all the more because the AFL at the time was fighting an NFL portrayal of it as “Mickey Mouse.” Stram tried to both motivate and lighten the mood against the Packers by having some staff members wear Mickey Mouse ears and piping in the Mickey Mouse theme as players arrived.

Redemption became all the more a mission after Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi spoke after the game and said the Chiefs didn’t rate with the best teams in the NFL.

A measure of the fury that inspired was just a few months away. Before a 1967 preseason game against the NFL’s Chicago Bears, Stram declared “this is not just another exhibition” and the Chiefs proceeded to clobber the Bears, 66-24, with Dawson throwing four touchdown passes.

Afterward, legendary Bears coach George Halas said the Chiefs “gave every indication” they were as good as any NFL team. Asked if they had any weaknesses, The Star wrote, he laughed and said, “We didn’t locate them, apparently.”

The matter of the AFL’s credibility was a unifying element for all concerned.

So much so that when the New York Jets won Super Bowl Three over Baltimore to give the AFL its first win in the game after the Packers had won the first two, Jets quarterback Joe Namath recalled what might be considered a surprise back at the hotel after the game.

According to Namath in “‘69 Chiefs,” Lanier, Thomas and Buck Buchanan “greeted us as we got off the bus, and we hugged, and we felt good about it.”

That game “kind of broke the ice,” Dale Stram said.

But it was also easy for some to dismiss it as a fluke.

Hunt and his Chiefs aimed to make that impossible.

‘The all-time AFL champion’

After the Chiefs beat the hated Raiders in the 1969 AFL championship game to earn the berth against Minnesota, Hunt stood in the locker room in Oakland and basked in the notion that the Chiefs were the only AFL team to win three league championships (including 1962 in Dallas).

“That makes us the all-time AFL champion,” he said.

Great in itself. But it would have been hollow without what happened next: “Lit up,” as Lanier would put it, by jerseys bearing a 10th anniversary AFL decal, the Chiefs pummeled 13-point favorite Minnesota, 23-7.

Afterward, according to The Star’s coverage, Stram smiled and gave a rare “no comment” when he was asked if he’d like to get even with Lombardi. But he acknowledged “a certain satisfaction” in beating an NFL team before joining them the next year.

“I think it’s only natural,” he said. “I think a lot of things were said about our game with the Packers that were uncalled for.”

Then somebody asked him if it was the NFL that can’t win the big one.

“I’m glad they’re saying that about someone else,” he said, laughing.

Much of the anguish of losing that first Super Bowl was eclipsed by winning that one.

“I don’t know if getting in heaven could be much more enjoyable,” Stram’s widow, Phyllis, told me in 2016.

While the game is best remembered for the Chiefs’ smothering defense, Stenerud’s three field goals and Dawson’s 46-yard touchdown pass to Otis Taylor, it featured another watershed development that resonates to this day.

‘Matriculating the ball down the field’

The reason 65 Toss Power Trap looms so large in Chiefs history is Stram’s glee in calling it (and having Mike Garrett score on the play) while unbeknownst to others being mic’d by NFL Films, a commonplace occurrence now but groundbreaking then — particularly because of the theatrical Stram.

(In contrast to Reid: When I asked him on Thursday if he’d ever consent to being mic’d up during a game, he just playfully said, “I’m not big on that.”)

If you ever hear someone refer to “matriculating the ball down the field,” you know where it came from.

“Even though they may or may not be aware that they’re not using the term correctly,” MacCambridge said. “Hank just liked big words. He didn’t necessarily always know what they meant. But he liked big words.”

And they liked him back: When MacCambridge interviewed NFL Films’ Steve Sabol for “America’s Game,” Sabol told him that video remained the most requested in their archives because nobody had ever seen anything like it before.

All of which was why it meant so much to Kansas City. Especially since the Chiefs’ success hinged on innovation, including schematically and in terms of full commitment to integration well before the NFL did, at a time the city was stepping into the future.

Hence, the subtitle of MacCambridge’s book on that team: the birth of modern Kansas City.

“They were a team that was very forward-looking,” he said. “And so that meant a great deal to a city still trying to live down its cowtown image.”

Even though the Chiefs of that time won only one Super Bowl. And their 27-24 double-overtime loss to Miami in a 1971 AFC divisional game heralded both the beginning of the end of those golden years and decades of playoff futility for the franchise.

After all that and feeling the presence of a curse as he was walking out of Arrowhead after the 22-21 playoff loss to the Titans in January 2018, MacCambridge still can’t believe “the amazing sense of destiny and good fortune” today.

The Chiefs heading to their fifth Super Bowl in six years after going 50 without, he said, has “changed the entire paradigm around this team … in ways that were inconceivable.”

Just like the world-wide scale of all this would have been unimaginable back in 1970.

So much is so different, of course.

But even with Kansas City surging as never before, with the still-new airport and as a 2026 FIFA World Cup host and all the symbolism implied by the KC Current’s CPKC Stadium being the first in the world purpose-built for a woman’s pro team, these Chiefs have a similar impact on civic pride and identity.

“The Chiefs’ success is a linchpin for a lot of the (other successes) that we’re having right now,” Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas told me in 2023.

And a chance to create an enduring legacy of their own above and beyond but nonetheless in the spirit of 1970 — when they validated AFL history and boosted Kansas City’s profile in a whole new way.

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