“You play to win the game,” Herm Edwards, the former NFL coach, once philosophized. In sports, the ring is the thing – and if not that then a medal, cup or some other decorative keepsake imbued with the history and prestige of a championship. Fans spend years emotionally investing in shiny baubles they’ll likely never commune with beyond a fleeting glimpse at a victory parade or civic rally, even as these trophy quests shape their lives and identities. But in the end, bragging rights are the best they can hope for; the hardware itself remains out of reach.

“You’re so used to seeing that moment of winning and holding up the trophy or medal,” said Vikki Tobak, an author and cultural critic. “You realize that they really are just proxies for this road to becoming great and being excellent at what you do – and that is something we as human beings understand fully across all things and genres.”

A new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, pegged to the upcoming World Cup, aims to give fans the contact high they’ve been missing. Titled For the Win, it showcases a selection of championship rings, trophies, medals and jewelry spanning nearly 150 years of US sports history. Highlights range from the 1877 NYPD Medal of Valor (whose interlocking N and Y are said to have inspired the New York Yankees’ iconic logo), to one of Jesse Owens’s four gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Games, to WNBA star Breanna Stewart’s 2024 championship ring – a diamond-encrusted jawbreaker that also houses a pair of matching earrings.

Victory photography, most recently of the Super Bowl-champion Seattle Seahawks, and other mystical talismans – such as the pearl necklace outfielder Joc Pederson made fashionable during the Atlanta Braves’ 2021 World Series run – round out the exhibition. Hardcore fans concerned with how John McEnroe’s 1983 Wimbledon trophy might look next to a velociraptor skull can park their outrage, knowing the show is housed in the museum’s dedicated gems and minerals space to emphasize the craftsmanship and artistry of the individual pieces.

“If you think about what a museum is, these are artifacts from history – moments in time that people want to recall or learn about,” says Rich Kleinman, a senior adviser on this project. “These trophies, rings and medals are artifacts in the same way. They fit in perfectly well.”

Curator is just one of the job titles Kleinman has juggled while serving as a longtime agent and business partner to Kevin Durant, carefully selecting the hard-earned prizes to hang around the NBA superstar’s various dwellings without dulling his hunger to pursue more. “The psychology of an athlete is: ‘I’m not gonna sit here and display my greatness while I’m still in the lab working every day to get better,’” Kleinman explains. “But they understand the emotional value of holding onto things. You see it with NBA athletes exchanging jerseys earlier in their careers. But I don’t think everybody necessarily sees the [broader] opportunity.”

Kleinman hadn’t considered getting into the museum game until he met Tobak at a 2024 American Museum of Natural History exhibition she curated called Ice Cold, a celebration of hip-hop jewelry based on her book of the same name. It was there she shared an idea for a follow-up exhibition timed to New York nominally playing host to the World Cup that would marry sports mythology with New York swagger while also reflecting the museum’s science-driven mission.

Once the For the Win motif was set, the next challenge was securing fodder for the trophy cases. Durant lent his 2024 Olympic gold medal and 2017 NBA championship ring, but not all hard-won prizes are so easily parted with. Some, such as the Heisman Trophy – a hallowed piece of hardware that became a subplot in the OJ Simpson murder trial – are almost never relinquished. Others are passed around but still fiercely guarded in their own way by the winners and then, in the case of the NHL’s Stanley Cup, given back. (Teams and players receive smaller replicas as keepsakes.)

The World Cup trophy – wrapped in its own layers of ritual, superstition and national lore – is already touring the US in advance of the tournament, keeping it out of bounds for this exhibition. Even then, fans who catch it in passing will only be able to get so close to soccer’s greatest prize: the current version of the trophy exists only because the original was stolen and never recovered – history that demands a stout defensive line.

Before it joined the exhibition, the New York Liberty’s 2024 WNBA trophy sat on proud display inside the locker room, reinforcing the standard. And then there are the baubles that go missing altogether, like Owens’s gold medal, which disappeared for years before shattering the record for the highest price ever paid for a piece of Olympic memorabilia at auction.

“The wonderful thing about having it in a museum is that they transport dinosaur bones and rare insects,” Tobak says, a reminder that these borrowed sports collectibles are ultimately passed into safekeeping. But even the museum’s sterling reputation for conservation wasn’t enough to deter Claressa Shields, women’s boxing champion, from personally delivering her 2019 middleweight championship belt – whose metal plating just cleared the threshold for entry onto the gems and minerals floor, despite the museum being unable to verify the belt’s exact metal composition. “She just wanted to understand the expansiveness of where the piece was going to live,” Tobak says.

Around the corner from the Hall of Meteorites, For the Win’s exhibition space is kept in near darkness, while individual artifacts are bathed in their own heavenly shafts of light. The sense of aura in the room is undeniable, but fans accustomed to seeing these treasures amid confetti showers or tear-stained cheeks might initially struggle to fully appreciate the exhibition.

Lock in, though, and you’ll soon appreciate the evolution of sports prizes – the timelessness of the World Series trophy set against ever more ornate World Series rings and Olympic medals with real heft (unlike the recent crop). “A few of the trophies had the players’ fingerprints still on them, so we did kind of have to light it in a way where it wasn’t that obvious,” Tobak says. “But that was cool because it made it feel human.”

As part of its World Cup festivities, the Natural History museum is also making space for all-ages, play-based elements and watch parties. Some might find that promise of ruckus a welcome reset from the stillness of the exhibition itself; for others, experiencing sport in a vacuum could well change how they see these games. By divorcing the pomp and circumstance of competition from the arena – and even the halls of fame where sport venerates itself – For the Win reveals the spectacle for what it truly is: fools in candy-colored laundry chasing the glory of bling, a pursuit that feels almost futile when set against the scale of a meteor. In the end, it’s all stuff that money could buy, or power could purloin, if the achievement itself weren’t so priceless.

“Again, it’s what they symbolize: winning, being the best,” Tobak says. “It’s very American. Just because you’re holding a gold medal doesn’t mean you won it. That’s why I keep saying sports culture is pop culture – it brings out the very best in what we as humans can achieve, and these symbols are going to outlive us all.”

• For the Win: Objects of Sports Excellence is now on show at the American Museum of Natural History in New York