Washington ? The NFL is losing its titans, one by one.

People around the league Thursday were mourning Lamar Hunt, the 74-year-old founder and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs who died Wednesday night at a Dallas hospital of complications from prostate cancer.

“Lamar Hunt was a founding father of modern professional sports,” former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said in a written statement released by the league.

The NFL lost one titan last year when longtime New York Giants owner Wellington Mara died, and now it has lost another.

When the owners gathered last week near Dallas, where Hunt lived, they knew his health was deteriorating. He’d been hospitalized for a partially collapsed lung, and doctors had found that his prostate cancer, diagnosed in 1998, had spread.

Chiefs President Carl Peterson, who had visited Hunt during that trip, stood outside the meeting room in Frisco, Texas, and talked about what his boss meant to the sport.

“I’m one of the most privileged executives to have worked for this man for 18 years,” Peterson said. “He is, I think, the finest owner in all of professional sports. He calls once a week from Dallas and says, ‘What are we doing and how can I help?’ We meet once a month during the season. Up until this season, in 17 years he’d missed one regular-season game. This year, unfortunately, he’s missed five. He’s a pillar and a founder in this league. … He’s always done what’s best for the league first and for his franchise second.”

Hunt was the founder of the American Football League and was a key figure in its merger with the NFL in 1970. Peterson spoke last week of being told stories by Hunt about his clandestine meetings in a parked car at Love Field in Dallas with Tex Schramm, the late president and general manager of the Cowboys, to plot the merger. Hunt was credited with coming up with the name Super Bowl, inspired by the tiny rubber SuperBall with which one of his children liked to play.

“He’s probably the most unique person I’ve known,” said San Diego Chargers Coach Marty Schottenheimer, who formerly coached the Chiefs. “The best story that I can remember of him came after the AFC championship game in ’94. (It was) January in Buffalo. We had played them in the regular season and beaten them easily, and then (Chiefs quarterback Joe) Montana got hurt. They beat us pretty well. The point differential wasn’t as great as the one when we beat them earlier in the year. We get on the bus. I’m upset: ‘Marty loses in the playoffs again.’

“Lamar sits down in the seat in front of me, and after a few minutes he turns to me and says, ‘They didn’t beat us by as much as we beat them.’ He’s a very giving person and clearly one of the architects of the NFL as we know it today.”

This is a time of division among owners. Owners of large-market franchises and small-market teams battle bitterly over labor and revenue-sharing issues. Some from the old guard have grown resentful of the ways of the newcomers while many newcomers scoff at the antiquated attitudes of the old-timers.

But, new or old, the owners revered Hunt. They awarded a Super Bowl to Kansas City out of respect for Hunt, although that fell through when the Chiefs were unable to secure public funding for a rolling roof at Arrowhead Stadium. The owners awarded this season’s Thanksgiving night game to the Chiefs because of Hunt. But he went into the hospital the day before Thanksgiving and was unable to watch the game because the hospital didn’t get the NFL Network. He listened to the broadcast over the phone. At last week’s meeting, the owners awarded the Chiefs $42.5 million from the league’s stadium subsidy fund to renovate Arrowhead. Hunt’s legacy will endure in the NFL: the AFC championship trophy is named for him. And Hunt’s 41-year-old son, Clark, remains the Chiefs’ chairman of the board.

“Everyone who follows professional football has lost a great friend in the passing of Lamar Hunt,” said Bills owner Ralph Wilson, a fellow member of the old guard, in a written statement. “He was an unparalleled fighter battling a serious disease for 8 1/2 years. He was responsible for bringing the game to all parts of the United States. He was respectful and generous to everybody. I have tears in my eyes in expressing my condolences to (Hunt’s wife) Norma and his family.”