Dallas ? The Kansas City Chiefs will tell you their greatest rival during the years has been the Oakland Raiders. But for Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, it was always the Cowboys.

Both Dallas and Kansas City lost a little piece of their football souls Wednesday when Hunt died of complications from cancer.

Hunt loved his hometown of Dallas. He loved his home away from home of Kansas City. He loved the Chiefs – and he loved to tweak the Cowboys.

“I always look forward to the Dallas games,” said Hunt in the 1990s. “I used to call it the Hunt Children Memorial Game because they’d get a lot of kidding when they were in school. It’s always been a game of high interest because of the awareness we used to be there.”

His Chiefs originally were the Dallas Texans, from 1960 to ’62.

Hunt founded the American Football League in 1960, and his first-year Texans went head-to-head with the first-year Cowboys of the NFL. Both teams played at the Cotton Bowl.

“It was a holy war of the two organizations,” Hunt said. “We had the disadvantage of being a new team in a new league. The Cowboys had the disadvantage of being unable to compete in their league.”

The Texans won earlier than the Cowboys. They went 8-6 that first season, the Cowboys 0-11-1.

The Texans won more than the Cowboys. They won 25 games from 1960 to ’62, the Cowboys nine.

The Texans won bigger than the Cowboys. They captured an AFL title in 1962 – four years before the Cowboys even reached the postseason. The Texans also were a more popular attraction than the Cowboys, outdrawing the NFL team in two of those three seasons.

The Texans fed off the rivalry.

“I remember one time they had a cow-milking contest,” Hunt said. “They got Cotton Davidson (of the Texans) and maybe Jerry Tubbs (of the Cowboys) – two players who were farm-boy types. First one to fill the pail wins. Cotton won it.”

Hunt was stocking his roster with former Texas collegians and sensed this was a fight for survival his AFL team could win. Either way, the Dallas football fan was the beneficiary. And that was Hunt’s goal in founding the AFL – bringing pro football to his hometown.

“There was a rivalry in the press and tremendous press attention,” Hunt said. “Blackie Sherrod, Dan Jenkins, Gary Cartwright, Bud Shrake, Sam Blair. . . . There was a huge amount written about pro football and the two teams.”

But neither team drew well. The Texans averaged 22,201 per game when they won the championship in 1962. The Cowboys averaged 21,778 that season.

“This is a business,” Hunt said. “The goal is to make it succeed. We didn’t need to bang our head against the wall. I couldn’t see that it would ever succeed with two teams going against each other.”

So, with championship trophy in hand, Hunt packed up the Texans and moved them to Kansas City, where they would become the Chiefs in 1963.

The Chiefs played the Cowboys five times over the years and posted a 2-3 record. Counting the preseason – and Hunt always did – the Cowboys held an 8-6 edge.

In recent years, Hunt created the “Preston Road Trophy” – a wooden block with a green Preston Road street sign on top to be awarded to the winner of any Chiefs-Cowboys tilt. Hunt named it after the street dividing the neighborhood where he and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones lived.

The Cowboys currently have the trophy. The greatest tribute the Chiefs could pay Hunt would be to win it back. No one enjoyed a victory over the Cowboys like Hunt.