KANSAS City, Mo. — When Jackson County voters in June 1967 approved $43 million in capital improvement bonds toward building twin stadiums conceptualized with a rolling roof, the Chiefs were only months removed from playing in the first Super Bowl and amid winning three AFL titles in eight seasons.

Befitting an emerging “it” team of the 1960s that would win Super Bowl IV just before the full merger with the NFL and a fresh welcome for the expansion Royals, the groundbreaking result was then-futuristic Royals Stadium (now known as Kauffman Stadium) and Arrowhead Stadium at the Truman Sports Complex.

“Before Arrowhead, all the stadiums were built to compromise both football and baseball,” Ron Labinski, the project architect for Charles Deaton’s Arrowhead design for Kivett & Myers, said in 2000. “Arrowhead was the first modern stadium built solely for football. What we did here in Kansas City revolutionized the way people think about stadiums and stadium design.”

Contoured to sight-lines and the fan experience in a new way, each stadium became iconic. Each still is, for that matter.

But while the Royals promptly maximized that with remarkable early success that culminated in winning the 1985 World Series, the Chiefs were an entirely different matter.

Once at Arrowhead in 1972, they didn’t so much as earn a playoff berth again until 1986 and didn’t host a postseason game there until 1991. In between, attendance waned and then plummeted and fan apathy reigned: By the time Carl Peterson took over running the franchise in 1989 and soon revitalized it, season-ticket sales were just over 20,000 in a then-capacity 78,000-seat stadium.

And that makes for a perhaps-too-late cautionary tale for the state of Kansas in the wake of the Chiefs’ announced intention to move into a glitzy new domed stadium there, largely furnished through billions of dollars in STAR bonds.

With ample reason, some experts already are skeptical about how the money will add up.

And that’s apparently even with an assumption of more Chiefs magic to come and the stadium being full of fans willing to upgrade their game-day spending from extreme now to something likely to be prohibitively expensive.

Among other debatable accounting matters, that’s a fundamental fallacy within a projection that will make Kansas whole, as it surely assumes sold-out stadiums to directly contribute to, and further spur, the necessary tax revenue.

In a certain way, it’s the greatest X-factor in the equation.

One that’s conspicuous through the arc of the history of Arrowhead and extremes at either end that demonstrate how past results are no guarantee of future success.

The point here isn’t paranoia, but a reality check — and learning from history so as not to be condemned to repeat it.

Unlikely as a repeat of that previous scenario might seem, it sure ought to be accounted for. But it’s unclear to what degree that’s even considered a possibility.

Since there are still checkpoints along the way to this intended move, buyer beware should be a prevailing mentality in any further reconciliations or negotiations. Not just because I’d rather see the Chiefs stay at Arrowhead, which I would, but because of this variable in the potentially problematic financial ramifications.

For Kansas, that is ... but not so much for the Chiefs, who naturally enough have sought to upgrade like so many of their competitors — including all three AFC West rivals — and stand to reap the benefits without suffering the pesky liabilities.

Because for all the mystique the stadium and its surroundings have come to enjoy, especially through the Mahomes Era, this season was a sobering reminder that it’s not necessarily sustainable.

After appearing in the last seven AFC championship games, earning five Super Bowl berths and winning three titles in that span, the Chiefs fell to 6-11 this season and have left open to question how much of it was a blip and how much signifies the end of an empire.

How they’ll rebound is a matter of conjecture. And that’s particularly unclear and more relevant in the context of 2031, when the Chiefs propose to move into their new stadium. While the Chiefs have prospered by an organizational alignment that has enabled this, safe to say much will be different by then.

Mahomes, now rehabilitating from a season-ending knee injury, will turn 36 that September. Andy Reid, the fourth-winningest coach in NFL history, will be 73 and seemingly more likely to have retired than not.

Travis Kelce, openly mulling retirement now, figures to be several years removed by then — as will be the buzz that’s been created by his relationship with fiancee Taylor Swift. If he’s still playing and here, Chris Jones would be 37.

That doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t be successful, of course, and it bears mention that it’s a lot harder to miss the playoffs now with 14 of 32 teams qualifying.

But it does mean that few of the most vital elements that have made the Chiefs so dominant and appealing and aspiring to be known as the World’s Team will be here for it.

And if you don’t think the expectation of all that winning and glamour is what Kansas is paying for and maybe even counting on, consider this:

Would the state really have committed all these financial resources back in, say, the 2016 season — before the Chiefs drafted Mahomes, and to which point they had won two postseason games ever at Arrowhead?

Back when Forbes set the team’s value at $1.88 billion (just over the $1.8 billion in construction bonds alone that Kansas has agreed to allocate toward building the new stadium) ... compared to its $6.2 billion assessed worth today?

Hard to think it would, right?

Which suggests that the premise of this maneuvering has been driven by some sense that this unprecedented era will go on and on and that the Chiefs won’t regress to the mean over time — in a league devoted to creating parity through the salary cap and scheduling, etc.

Of course, mere perennial contention isn’t an impossible standard.

And between the novelty of what figures to be a palace with an emphasis on preserving the tailgating experience, many fans figure to embrace the new and spend, spend, spend at the heart of an evidently sprawling STAR bond district to help make good on it.

But what happens if the Chiefs are, say, so-so ... or worse?

Let’s flash back to 1972, when no one would have anticipated what would come next for the Chiefs after a boom decade.

Even in the wake of their shattering 27-24 double-overtime playoff loss to the Dolphins on Christmas Day 1971 (in the last game at Municipal Stadium), a team brimming with future Pro Football Hall of Famers seemed poised for plenty ahead months later when the Chiefs played host to the Dolphins in the inaugural Arrowhead game.

Instead, the Dolphins beat the Chiefs 20-10 that day — and embarked on their perfect season and first of back-to-back Super Bowl triumphs.

And the Chiefs abruptly began to fade before Peterson — who inexplicably isn’t in the Chiefs Hall of Fame — essentially revived the franchise.

Peterson was the driving force behind the tailgating that came to define the Chiefs experience, and his hiring of Marty Schottenheimer led to seven postseason appearances in nine seasons.

It all went together: Ticket demand soared as the Chiefs went 102-58 in the 1990s — second only to San Francisco (113-47) and Buffalo (103-57) — and the Arrowhead aura became a living, breathing thing.

Attendance naturally ebbed again as the Chiefs had one winning season between 2006 and 2012, leading to the hiring of Reid and a new vibrancy about ever since.

In The Before Times, NFL Films had taken to avoiding shots of Arrowhead’s upper deck because there were so many empty seats. After the team finally came alive there, NFL Films’ Steve Sabol would later say it was the best stadium in the NFL at which to shoot footage.

Assuming the move to Kansas goes through, it will be up to the Chiefs and the architects and contractors they retain to establish a new sort of distinctive and enticing experience.

No doubt it will be spectacular.

But that won’t be enough to make this work in and of itself.

Because no matter how much it might revolutionize how people think about stadium design, it will be a hollow burden on the state of Kansas if these Chiefs decline remotely like the last ones that got a new stadium.

Improbable or not, nobody can assure how that will play out, and what impact it will have one way or another on the viability of the proposed project.

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