The Super Bowl isn’t a new idea anymore, though some of us remember when it was.

We are becoming fewer. Of course.

And those intimately involved with the game … to the point of being at all of them … well, only a handful remain.

I knew most of the journalism side of this story. What I didn’t know how thin on the ground the civilians were becoming, too.

It appears it could be that as few as six human beings will have seen, with their own eyes, every Super Bowl, when the clock runs out on XLV tomorrow.

Specifically …

–The number of sports writers who will have seen every game is down to three. One of them, Jerry Izenberg, who is 80, is profiled in this column by Jim Politi in the Newark Star-Ledger.

Only two other sports journalists have seen every Super Bowl, Jerry Green of the Detroit News and Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald. That’s it. As the column on Izenberg notes, guys who had seen them all began having meetings/reunions before the game, and even by Super Bowl XV — 30 years ago — they were down to about 30 guys. Presumably all of them columnists or football beat writers.

The number might be even fewer … well, zero … if they hadn’t lived through the glory days of American sports sections, when so many papers traveled so often.

It seems that infirmity or death is what ended the streaks for many of the other guys who got to the first 30 or so. For some reason, the name “John Steadman” of the Baltimore Sun popped into my head, and in this decade-old column by John Eisenberg we see that Steadman made it to the first 34 Super Bowls, one of only nine guys who got that far.

Closer to home, and more recent … Bob Oates of the Los Angeles Times saw the first 39 Super Bowls, which I noted in a sort of obituary I did on Oates and David Poole on this blog in 2009. It was poor health that ended Oates’s streak, apparently at age 89. Seeing 39 Super Bowls would have taken him through the Patriots 24, Eagles 21, in Jacksonville in 2005.

And a last thought here, on the sports journalist side of “seeing every Super Bowl” … three factors come together to make this tricky. First, you had to be good enough already in January of 1967 to have your paper send you to Los Angeles for the first Super Bowl. (Before it was even known as the Super Bowl.) Odds are, then, that you weren’t young. Izenberg, for instance, apparently was 35 when the first Super Bowl was played.

Second, you had to stay on the beat. In journalism, that doesn’t always happen. Some of the best reporters around spent maybe a decade on the NFL, but then did something else. And when you do something else, you don’t go to the Super Bowl.

Third, you pretty much have to be associated with a newspaper that will still send you to the game even though you’re now seriously old and almost certainly not a full-time writer. That seems to be the case with our three survivors.

(I have seen, I think, 12 Super Bowls, in person. The one I’m not sure about is XXI, Giants 39, Broncos 20, at the Rose Bowl in 1987. I should have gone, but I might not have because I was a sports editor at the time and might have stayed home to organize the coverage in the paper. Thing is, I have no recollection of that game. If I had access to microfilm, I could check. So, either 11 or 12.)

–Now, we move on to the civilians. I don’t know how these guys proved they had seen them all (ticket stubs? It’s not like they have bylines to prove it.), but a Visa credit card campaign has found four men who say they have seen them all. Here is a youtube clip featuring one of them, who admits he has missed weddings and the births of children to keep up his streak.

I hate linking to a corporate press release, and I may never have done this before, but here is a link to the Visa media release on their “see every Super Bowl”campaign.

The news here is … that of the four guys who have seen every game, one of them has fallen ill and won’t be able to make tomorrow’s game, a sad little story that was on the espn.com homepage for a while today.

So, maybe six guys will have seen them all by the end of the game tomorrow.

Another declining number is … people who have seen all the Super Bowls live — in person or on television. I saw the first 43 of them. The first, through a snowy television at my parents’ home in Long Beach, California. The game wasn’t all that big a deal back then, and the game was blacked out in the Los Angeles market because the Coliseum was not sold out. But my father, who was not a big sports fan, seemed to take it personally, and I clearly remember him clomping around on the roof as he fashioned some advanced sort of antenna to pull in a signal from San Diego. It made for an awful picture, but we saw the Packers rout the Chiefs.

One other close call I remember was in 1979, when I was on a road trip in Arizona covering UCLA basketball. Their trip straddled the weekend; the Bruins had a Monday night game in Tempe still to come, and I almost missed kickoff because their practice session at Arizona State on Super Sunday ran fairly long. But I saw the game, Pittsburgh 35, Dallas 31, sitting in my motel room, on a little TV.

I got back to SoCal from Hong Kong just in time two years ago to see Steelers 29, Cardinals 24 in 2009; it literally was my first full day back in the country after working at the International Herald Tribune.

But the streak ended here in Abu Dhabi last year. I saw none of last year’s game live, as I recall. I saw a highlights package soon after. And I won’t see this one live, either, unless I take up an offer to join a viewing party up by the Corniche.

The problem with the Super Bowl here is that it will begin at 3:29 a.m. and end at about 7:15 a.m. –  or basically the worst possible time to watch a game live. Your choices are “see the game” or “screw up your body clock for days.”

So, I’m out.

Anyone under 50 can’t really say they’ve “seen” all of them. So that’s another huge chunk of people. Actually, my mother probably has seen all of them. A fan, always able to get a signal …

But how many others? Maybe 1 percent of the U.S. population has seen every Super Bowl? Less?

So, any way you want to look at the Super Club — sports writers, regular citizens, even on TV — it’s getting pretty exclusive.