The aftermath of Super Bowl XXXIV was almost predictable. The St Louis Rams' two most conspicuous religious zealots, Kurt Warner and Isaac Bruce, hooked up for a game-winning touchdown pass with two minutes left and promptly credited Jesus. (This sentiment is probably not shared by Tennessee cornerback Samari Rolle, who helped facilitate the play when he fell, in Bruce's words, "flat on his face" just before the pass arrived).

The morning after the 23-16 victory in Atlanta, Dick Vermeil, the Rams' emotional 63 year-old coach, burst into tears when a reporter asked him if he had cried the night before. And on Tuesday, Vermeil tendered his resignation, paving the way for the ascension of Mike Martz, the team's innovative offensive co-ordinator, to the helm.

The most ironic moment of all, however, came just minutes after the game, when 72-year-old Rams owner Georgia Lee Irwin Geiger Johnson Hayes Wyler Rosenbloom Frontiere hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy over her head and declared it to be the rightful property of "the players, the fans, and the people of St Louis."

If Madam Ram has genuinely come around to holding that view, then perhaps it is time she returned another trophy she has been hoarding for the past two decades to its rightful owners in Baltimore. The missing trophy from Super Bowl V now reposes in the California mansion Georgia Frontiere continues to maintain, despite her having moved her football team from Tinseltown to St Louis four years ago.

The long, strange trip of the original copy of the first-ever Vince Lombardi Trophy began in Miami in 1971, where the Colts defeated the Cowboys on Jim O'Brien's last-minute field goal to win. Produced by the prestigious jewellery firm of Tiffany & Co, the Super Bowl trophies had existed before, but this was the first to have been named for Lombardi, the legendary Packers' coach who had died a few months earlier.

After the game it was presented by Lombardi's widow Marie, who told Carroll Rosenbloom, then the Colts' owner, "Vince would have been so happy for someone like you to have this." Evidently, Rosenbloom took that sentiment literally.

How the trophy came from there to its current position as a door-stop in Georgia Frontiere's sun-room is a bit more complicated.

A year after the Colts won the Super Bowl, Rosenbloom swapped franchises, lock, stock, and barrel, with Dan Reeves, who owned the Rams, and Reeves then sold the Colts to Robert Irsay. When the Rosenblooms moved to Hollywood, the Lombardi Trophy remained behind in a trophy case at the Colts' offices, an omission which appears to have troubled Rosenbloom.

Two years later, prior to Super Bowl VII at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Rosenbloom contacted the Colts and suggested that they bring the trophy out to LA, where he proposed to display it at Pete Rozelle's Commissioner's Party, a grandiose affair held aboard the Queen Mary off Long Beach that year. Although Rosenbloom told the Colts' management he was going to display the trophy alongside those of all the other Super Bowl winners, this was plainly not the case. Neither the Packers, Chiefs, Jets, or Cowboys were ever asked to bring their trophies along to LA. Moreover, I happened to be aboard the Queen Mary two nights before Super Bowl VII, and unless it was locked away in one of Geraldo Rivera's trunks, I can assure you that the Super Bowl V trophy was not.

"Eddie Rosenbloom (Carroll's nephew, who had remained in Baltimore as the Colts' business manager) and I brought the trophy with us on a flight to San Francisco," former New York Giants' general manager George Young, now an NFL vice president, told me over breakfast in Atlanta last Sunday morning.

"The next morning Eddie took the trophy, in a green velvet bag, with him on a plane to Los Angeles," said Young, who in 1973 was the Colts' player personnel director.

That was the last the Colts saw of it. Once he realised he had been had, Irsay pestered the Rams for its return. "He kept saying, `Where's the Super Bowl trophy?," Don Klosterman, Rosenbloom's Colts general manager who had moved with him to Los Angeles in the same capacity, recalled last week. "I said, `the last time I saw it, one of our office workers was polishing it.' I knew where it was, of course. Carroll had it, because he said he deserved it, and it wasn't Irsay's."

Joe Thomas, who had received a handsome finder's fee for brokering the Rosenbloom-Reeves-Irsay transaction, was by now the Colts' general manager, and, said Young yesterday, "Joe thought the history of the team began with the day he took office. Frankly, he just didn't give a (damn)."

In time a duplicate version was made and all would have been well had not Irsay subsequently absconded to Indianapolis with the Vince Lombardi Trophy, along with the Colts football team.

History-minded Baltimoreans went to court and eventually got the Lombardi Trophy returned four years ago, but the version on display there is a replica and not the original. The name of George Young, who in 1970 had been the Colts' offensive line coach, was omitted from the original but added to the duplicate. The copy is now on display in a mini-museum of old Baltimore Colts' memorabilia at McCafferty's, a Mount Washington pub owned by the son of former Baltimore coach Don McCafferty.

Witnesses have subsequently confirmed the whereabouts of the original. New York Giants' GM Ernie Accorsi, a former Colts' public relations director, reports having seen it in Carroll Rosenbloom's house. (Rosenbloom told him it was a "copy.") Steve Rosenbloom, Georgia Frontiere's estranged son-in-law who was fired by Madam Ram in one of her first acts as owner 21 years ago, also confirmed that his father kept the Colts' trophy. "It just mysteriously appeared at my father's house," said Rosenbloom fils. Numerous visitors to Georgia Frontiere's Bel Air mansion have also reported sighting what was either the Vince Lombardi Trophy or something that looks very much like it in Madam Ram's sun room. The St Louis club's official position is that since the principals involved - Carroll Rosenbloom, Robert Irsay, Pete Rozelle, and, for that matter, Vince Lombardi - are all deceased, the issue should be a moot point.

The people of Baltimore obviously feel otherwise. Now that she has one of her own, Georgia Frontiere has a chance to do the proper thing for once in her life, and this would surely seem the appropriate time to do it.