Mr. Finkelman’s perhaps quixotic legal campaign hinges on the difference between the face value of his tickets, about $500 each, and what he had to pay to get them. The league’s own website explains the situation with an understatement: “The demand for tickets to the Super Bowl greatly exceeds the supply.” The vast majority of seats — and this year there are more than 80,000 — are never made directly available for purchase by the public. First, 75 percent are distributed among the N.F.L.’s 32 teams, with 17.5 percent given to each team playing in the game and about 6 percent given to the host team (or teams, in this instance, with the Giants and the Jets splitting that allotment). Another 25 percent are kept by the league itself and are given to officials, the media and important corporate sponsors.

That leaves just 1 percent or so for ordinary fans like Mr. Finkelman, whose only chance to buy a seat at face value was to enter the lottery that is held each year by mail starting in February and ending in June, well before many people are thinking about the game. Mr. Finkelman admitted that his interest in the contest was not fully piqued until late in the season, when the lottery was long over and the league’s face-value tickets, starting at $500, were already gone. The delay compelled him to conduct his search in the secondary market, where, according to the ticket service TiqIQ, the average seat last week in the relatively inexpensive mezzanine level was $2,900, and the costliest corporate suite was going for the mansion-like sum of $962,000.

Common wisdom holds that Super Bowl XLVIII is unique because it is the first championship game in N.F.L. history to be held outdoors in a cold-weather stadium. But there is an additional distinction, said Bruce Nagel, Mr. Finkelman’s lawyer: It is being played in New Jersey, a state that has an uncommonly expansive consumer protection law.