“I am the way into the city of woe, I am the way into eternal pain, I am the way to go among the lost.” —Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 1321

“People either love us or hate us, but the most important thing is to be relevant.” —Jerry Jones, from his helicopter, 2016

About a quarter-mile walk from AT&T Stadium, the Arlington spaceship that the Dallas Cowboys call home, the man I’d been looking for stood in a parking lot hidden beneath shoulder pads, a glittering luchador mask, leather cowboy boots, and jingling spurs. He was born Miguel, but on Sundays hardly anyone calls him that. I got blank stares when I dropped his government name as I sought him out at the pregame tailgate. Things changed for the better when I referenced his online handle, “Supercowboy.” That’s when heads started bobbing and pointer fingers signaled past a grill and a few coolers, to the masked man himself, resplendent in silver and blue uniform—save for a camo “Salute to Service” Dallas jersey.

“It’s pretty hot for November,” he said, greeting me under a white tent. “I got to stay out of the sun, or I’m going to start cooking a little bit.”  

Born in the U.S. and raised between Tijuana and Los Angeles, Miguel started donning the ensemble on game days in the Golden State, incorporating game-replica pants and Old West footwear after moving to Texas in 2019. The accoutrements include arm sleeves with both the American and Mexican flags, a pair of Cowboys Band-Aids placed like eye black, a cowhide holster for his smartphone, a 10-gallon hat, and blue high socks to put the uniform over the top. All told, it takes him about half an hour to get the whole thing on in the morning. He slips the wrestling guise over his head mid-drive and keeps it in place until he’s back home. His wife has yet to voice any displeasure. 

I first reached out to him seeking to put a face (or mask) to late-stage Cowboys devotion, the most contentiously regarded rooting interest in the U.S. sporting landscape. Over the course of an afternoon, I watched as Miguel posed for countless selfies inside and outside AT&T Stadium, handing out stickers to any little kids startled by the outfit. It was never clear how many folks knew him personally and how many just vibed with the getup. 

Miguel began rooting for the team after its victory at the Rose Bowl in Super Bowl XXVII. He swears (correctly) that Dez caught it, believes (incorrectly) that Cooper Rush “is a good quarterback,” says that he was “never a big fan” of current—possibly, somehow, for the foreseeable future—head coach Mike McCarthy, and knows that things could, comparatively speaking, get worse. His take on the 82-year-old Jerry Jones’s reign over the franchise is relatively nuanced but boils down to be careful what you wish for. I asked him how he felt about the team’s prospects against the Eagles that afternoon. “I’m not going to put my money on it, but I think they have a good chance,” Miguel said, unfurling a knowing glance. “If things line up the way that I wish they would, I think they could win.”

Three hours later, after four fumbles, 49 total passing yards, a quarterback change, and a shit ton of booing, we watched together as the Cowboys lost, at home, by four touchdowns. 

I did not get it out the mud. When it comes to fandom, I see no virtue in dirtying these hands. Big fella, I already lose enough in real life. Forecasts say I’ll lose some more. No te entiendo. Can’t hear over the sound of all this sweet, unearned athletic gratification. I’ll start my distractions on third, thank you very much. Keep that plucky, overlooked junk off my plate, kid. 

This is, invariably, why I dropped them. The Dallas Cowboys—produced, arranged, and written by the ruffian Jerry Jones. That’s my pops’s team, not mine. I tapped out after the second of three divisional losses to Green Bay in less than a decade. Tossed my hat at the TV. Left a crack. Told people it fell on its own. Depending on your perspective, those details make me either the keenest subsection of Cowboy fan or the most Cowboy-ish of them all. 

They’re just easy punching bags. Seamlessly, if not always accurately, typecast. Fickle front-running fools. Delusional dullards. Vacillating in late spring and early fall between purple and gold and imparted pinstripes. Worse than losers. Less than winners. They are many, they are incessant, and they are despised. 

They are also at their wits’ end. 

In a 30-year onslaught of high-leverage Cowboy humiliation, 2024 has managed to stand apart for your least favorite fans and your least favorite team. After struggling through eight games, their highest-paid QB ever has a hamstring that just had to be reattached to the bone. A scandal dawned about the sunshine getting into a star wideout’s eyes. Last week the roof was opened at AT&T Stadium so the Lord could watch His ’boyz, and he responded by knocking a hunk of metal down, with a note that read, “Please, I beg, stop.”  

There are squads around the league with worse records. Rosters with less talent. Fan bases hungrier for incremental victories. But this year’s Cowboys—three games below .500 entering Thursday’s Thanksgiving Day matchup vs. the Giants—are the most on-brand exhibition in the sport because they’re somehow, once again, the sport’s biggest letdown.  

Generally, people learn. Wise man said, “Can’t get fooled again.” But not when it comes to the Cowboys. Here, Dallas is the huckster that won’t stop coming out on top. The franchise owes a portion of this to the economic machine and customer base that have driven its value to a full $2.5 billion more than the next runner-up. But another part of the Cowboys’ ability to restore what they always seem to tarnish is the fact that they win. Just not when it’s mattered. This century, at least. 

The bad is clean and cold. The Cowboys haven’t won consecutive playoff games in three decades. They’re one of four teams in the midst of an active conference championship game drought of at least 28 years. Yet this is where the good still manages to muck everything up: They’re exceptionally successful when the times aren’t exceptional. Since the turn of the century, there are two NFL teams in the top 10 of regular-season win percentage who haven’t won a championship. One of them plays in Minnesota—a franchise that has at least a half dozen active curses going—but the other suits up with a star on their helmets.  

People have been calling them America’s Team for more than four decades, in shortly rued pride and deep-seated derision, but it’s precisely this astounding, maddening 21st-century track record that is the most convincing case that the title is true. For it would be a pity if the team we identified with our Grand Experiment were anything other than one that can’t quite get out of its own way, can’t quite live up to its promise—just as it would be a different kind of shame if that team weren’t so consistently and thoroughly able to convince its adherents, its customers, its millions of fans that it just might do it. Such is the divine comedy of the Dallas Cowboys. The duel that keeps their faithful legions up at night and greets them in the morning. The not-so-distant hope that this is the time they’ll get their act together and the just-as-close reality that somewhere along the line, they’ll find a way not to.

They came in droves and not in peace. I arrived at MetLife Stadium in late September and was enveloped by both humidity and discontent. Three games into the season, Cowboys fans were already midway through the five stages of grief, though not quite close to acceptance. A week earlier, the Cowboys had allowed Derrick Henry, Baltimore’s gargantuan backfield addition, to gash them on the ground for 151 yards and two touchdowns, after they ghosted him in free agency six months earlier in favor of former team star Ezekiel Elliott’s petrified athletic remains. They lost that game 28-25, putting them at 1-2 in the infant season, heading into Week 4 against the Giants.

Coming off a 48-32 shellacking at home in the wild-card round of the 2023 playoffs, Cowboys management spent all of the spring and most of the summer failing to resolve contract disputes with its two best players, ninth-year quarterback Dak Prescott and elastic wideout CeeDee Lamb. Jones publicly backed beleaguered head coach Mike McCarthy, expressing a preference for stability within the organization, but three straight 12-5 seasons had all produced the same result: first-round exits.

The parking lots surrounding the Meadowlands—dotted with silver and blue tents, flags, recreational vehicles, and transplanted fanatics—were hotbeds of Cowboy agita. All the supporters I spoke with were, in one way or another, rattled by the previous week’s showing, though each responded in their own way. One, a fan since back when the squad went 1-15 in 1989, confided in me that he’d been avoiding SportsCenter completely. I asked whether he thought the team’s recent big-game mediocrity would invalidate the whole “America’s Team” thing. He wouldn’t go that far: “Either you love them or you hate them, but you care.” 

Another fan admitted to “cursing them out” but not turning the television off. “Win or lose, we’re still gonna be America’s Team,” she maintained. “Everybody wanna be like us.” A fan from Patterson, New Jersey, told me he’d been rooting for Dallas since the ’70s and could spot a loser when he saw one. This was one of those times: “I want them to win. But I know if we good or not.” I asked him the same question as the first two subjects—at what point of embarrassment would you consider tapping out? “I don’t know,” he said, seemingly ruing his existence. “Every year I say it, but … I could never.”

By halftime I was up in the press box. Through two quarters, CeeDee Lamb had 94 receiving yards, and the team was up 14-9. Lamb would notch only 4 more yards and Dallas would score only two field goals for the rest of the game. They ultimately held on, 20-15, in a slog of a contest, but a substantial number of fans weren’t there to see the finale. People had already begun heading for the exits before the end of the fourth quarter. Even in victory, they’d seen enough. Some were drunk, many were sober, and, only a month into the season, almost all were tired. 

The first age of the empire carried with it more than plain gridiron success. The Cowboys won more games than any other team in the 1970s—they maintained a .729 regular-season win percentage and made five Super Bowls, winning two of them. They picked up the alias America’s Team in a grainy NFL Films highlight tape after a Super Bowl loss in ’78. (Though there’s been some recent conjecture about whether they were even the league’s first choice for the title.) “They appear on television so often,” the clip goes, “that their faces are as familiar to the public as presidents and movie stars.” It was not hyperbole. 

Dallas lived on national broadcasts. Twenty-one Cowboys had their own radio shows, while the team boasted the league’s largest FM network. Even the club’s weekly magazine reflected its cultural supremacy: At the peak of the print era, it had the second-largest circulation in the country of weekly sports publications in the U.S. Stick a star to anything, and it flew off the shelf. Cowboys products accounted for over a quarter of all NFL merchandise sold in the decade. Future Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach starred in national ads for McDonald’s and the toy company Mattel. Linebacker Lee Roy Jordan did print ads for Volkswagen. By 1981, at the back end of the Tom Landry dynasty, the Cowboys were featured in nine of the 16 games broadcast nationally. Even their cheerleaders had their own TV show. 

In ’89 they were purchased by an Arkansas oil wildcatter born Jerral Wayne Jones. He set out from the beginning of his tenure to ensure that America’s Team appealed to all of America’s dollars. “We’ve lost the Hispanic fans,” he reportedly confided to advisers. “We need to get them back.” He signed deals with Pepsi, Nike, and Amex when the league sponsors were Coke, Reebok, and Visa. He won a battle with the NFL to secure team-specific licensing rights. He swapped flagship radio stations for more exposure and cash. 

This is Jerry the marketing genius, fluent reader of the winds of commerce, the jetpack on the Goliath’s back. Of course, there are many Jerrys. The one who was the first owner in football with a TV show and a print column. The one who pissed off his players and coaches by bringing a Saudi prince down to the field, six bodyguards in tow. The one who yearned for more credit, more action, who told reporters between championships, “Shit, I could have coached the hell out of this team.” The man Emmitt Smith complained about in 1991, who treated the Cowboys “like some kind of show” and thought he was “the star—at least in his own eyes.” You cannot separate this Jerry from that Jerry. The guy who said on national television that his own quarterback “looks good in the shower” and the guy who doubled the team’s revenue in four years of ownership. 

They are his rough beast, his American drama. They’re still the most popular NFL team in research reports, even with the dearth of post-Triplets playoff success. They claim to have sold out every home game since 2002. Hundreds of private suites leased for hundreds of thousands yearly. A venue nearly twice as large as Yankee Stadium, roughly twice the size of the team’s old one in Irving. Jones bought the Cowboys for $140 million. Today, they’re the richest sports team in the world, valued at over $10 billion, with revenue streams double those of the next-closest NFL competitor. 

“What Jerry said when he bought the team,” host Craig Miller of Dallas’s 96.7 The Ticket told me over the phone, “35 years ago [was] ‘We’re going to win with glitz and glamour.’ And he has maintained that. Even though they don’t necessarily win, they are the glitziest, most glamorous franchise. … They wanted to be flashy and eccentric and have the craziest stadium. And I think fans—Americans—are drawn to that. They’re drawn to that style over substance.”

Off Maryland’s National Harbor, in a plush sports bar, there are Cowboys fans in enemy territory. Dots of blue and silver in a sea of red and gold. Supporters of the resurgent Commanders outnumber weary Dallas devotees three to one, but a single holdout in particular still comes in all the time. When we first spoke, Kelli Collins told me she had no delusions of Cowboy grandeur. “I’m more of a realistic Cowboy fan,” she said to me at one point. “I have a feeling that a coach or two may be fired. Everybody is on a one-year run.” 

A DMV native, Kelli grew to love the Cowboys while watching them as a 5-year-old with her grandfather. She’s one in a colony of fans in the nation’s capital who cheer for the Cowboys rather than for the Commanders, in part because of the history of racism in Washington under founding owner George Preston Marshall. Kelli runs the largest Cowboys fan club in D.C., a collective of 30 total members. When we met at the bar, she was wearing a matching Dallas camo hat and hoodie and was eventually joined by two other members of their group, one in a CeeDee Lamb jersey named Noel and another in a Trevon Diggs jersey named Gary.

Dallas was playing the Atlanta Falcons in what was as close to a must-win game as one can have nine weeks into a season. In game, the group’s thoughts on Jerry Jones ranged from “Fuck Jerry” to “He old and senile” to “I’m ready for that motherfucker to go.” When the Cowboys defense allowed a 16-yard toss after pinning the Falcons to their own goal line, Kelli sighed to no one in particular, “Welcome to the life of a Cowboys fan.”

This was a few days before the presidential election, and viewers of each glossy flat screen were subjected to a deluge of campaign advertising. A few minutes after one of these commercials, Dak Prescott tore his hamstring on a failed conversion attempt and was officially removed from the game around the end of the third quarter. We didn’t know it at the time, but he wouldn’t play again this season. 

When kicker Brandon Aubrey hit a 57-yard attempt, Noel turned to Kelli and asked, “Can he play quarterback?” By midway through the fourth quarter, Dallas was down by two touchdowns. “This team get on my fucking nerves, can you put that?” Noel asked me, as I pecked out notes on the proceedings in my phone. 

“Have you ever considered that they were cursed?” I wondered. 

“Of course I’ve considered it,” he answered. 

“Everything I’ve considered.”

The land on the eastern side of the Trinity River was called Dallas for the first time in 1841. The outpost served as the sole dependable river crossing for miles. When railroads came to the area, it blossomed into the center of commerce for all of north-central Texas, its economic drivers shifting to banking, insurance, and oil. Dallas was—by act, choice, and reputation—deemed something close to a chosen land for a self-chosen people. Over the three decades following the turn of the century, the population would increase by 170,000 people. A flood of businesses established their headquarters in the area: Texas Instruments, Dr. Pepper, Neiman Marcus department stores. By 1960 the population reached 680,000.

The image of a charmed economic colossus was, though, always a matter of perspective. The first influx of Anglo-American settlers expelled three major Native American settlements and brought with them the institution of slavery. As folks and companies planted their flag in Dallas over the decades, segregation and political violence festered, a noxious stew that eventually laid the ground for not just the killing of the nation’s 35th president, but the open murder of his killer while he was in police custody. 

This is the wider context out of which the Dallas Cowboys sprouted. The franchise—founded by an oil magnate named Clint Murchison Jr. in 1960—tried out two other Old West handles, the Steers and the Rangers, before landing on the present title. It was formed at a time when the NFL’s popularity was rapidly expanding, yet, crucially for the sake of the Cowboys’ growth, there was only one other team (the Washington franchise) for Dallas to compete with for fans throughout the American South. 

Cowboy president and general manager Tex Schramm jumped at the chance to broaden their reach by playing Thanksgiving Day games. At home, as Dallas entered into its dynastic era, perceptions of the squad reached nearly ecstatic levels. In his book The Dallas Cowboys, Joe Nick Patoski uncovered two assessments from local psychologists at the time. “People identify with the Cowboys,” one said, at the height of their golden era, “as if they were on the field themselves.” The legend around their stadium in Irving went that it had a hole in the roof so that the Almighty could gaze down on their favorite team. “It’s almost like some of it rubs off on you,” the other psychologist noted. “If you’re a big Cowboys supporter and the Cowboys win, it’s almost like you’re a winner too.”

When Texas Stadium first opened in 1971, it was criticized, first and foremost by the press. They called it “Millionaires’ Meadows” and “The House of Greed” and bemoaned the excess of luxury boxes, describing it as a place more akin to “a convention in a hotel” than to a stadium. Hall of Famer Mel Renfro played cornerback on the day it opened and would later describe the crowds as “a bunch of rich people who couldn’t get excited about anything.” It’s not hard to see the offspring of this undeniable opulence manifest today in person at the 100,000-person-capacity AT&T Stadium, which, at a price tag of $1.5 billion, is still among the most expensive stadiums ever built a decade and a half after it opened. For eight or nine days a year, Jerry World is likely to hold the single largest assemblage most of the attendees will ever be a part of in their lives. They fill endless rows in the stadium, seemingly innumerable sections. 

At almost all times, onlookers can’t help but lock in to the dual-sided, 72-by-160-foot HD TV hanging midfield, in all its 600-ton glory. At their disposal are 1,600 toilets, 3,000 flat-screen TVs, 10 private clubs, burgers, sausages, barbecue, tacos, pizza, ice cream, beer, and wine. Corporate sponsors are a who’s who of American commerce: UnitedHealthcare, Ford, Dr. Pepper, Miller Lite (“THE ONLY BEER OF THE DALLAS COWBOYS”), Pepsi, AT&T, Blockchain.com, American Airlines, Bank of America, Whataburger, the University of North Texas. 

It is not about the field of play. It is not meant to bring forth competitive value. The stadium is a statement, an edict in glass, steel, concrete. It appears, at all times, as something of another realm, another place, all shining and reflective and wide. 

It is, even up close, so massive and yet so parceled. So clearly designed for humanity and so clearly beyond the physical capacities of humankind alone. This has the cumulative effect of making the lines of visitors streaming out after wins and losses look like Texas fire ants, flushed out into the night. 

Everything—the gateways, the arches, the people, the cars—is touched by some part of its luminescence. Everything but the team glows in the reach of its light. 

There are three Dallas Cowboys helmets spread across the Kersh family’s front yard. The smallest is wedged onto the skull of a 20-foot skeleton with an Emmitt Smith jersey on. The largest is sprayed onto game-used turf and is covered only partially by the axle of a blue and white pickup with four Super Bowl insignias. Helmet three appears drawn on what is sort of a bottle cap, if the bottle’s size were measured in yards. A wooden gate to the backyard opens behind the latter, which is where Diana Kersh met me so that I could “come on inside.” 

Diana’s husband, Stoney, is the chiefmost collector of Cowboys memorabilia anywhere on earth. With her help, he’s turned the family’s Arlington one-story into a pseudo-museum, open to the public for free. Visitors over the years have ranged from Drew Pearson and Michael Irvin to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, but the most cherished ones are citizens of Cowboy nation who make in-season pilgrimages. Accompanied by the family’s German shepherd, Dak, Diana showed me around the property, past Stoney’s Cowboy-inspired chopper covered all over in Dallas stars, under a canopy with a model Ring of Honor protruding from the ceiling, next to an extra-large Troy Aikman poster and a projector for watching games outside. 

“Stoney decorated all this,” Diana told me, gesturing to the hodgepodge of Cowboy paraphernalia. “All of it. I just clean it.”

The family thinks its collection has close to 100,000 objects in total. Items include but are not limited to hats, bobbleheads, flags, lunch boxes, cups, toys, inflatables, blankets, helmets, masks, board games, paintings, plates, stickers, phones, clocks, soda bottles, mugs, windbreakers, guitars (one acoustic, two electric), a Cowboys Crock-Pot, a Cowboys light fixture,  Cowboys magazines, Cowboys game logs, Cowboys books, and cardboard cutouts of former Cowboys. There is no escaping it. Stars, helmets, blue, white, and silver stretch over every inch of every room. After Stoney finished giving a tour to a group of visitors, he took over for Diana and showed me around the rest of the house. 

A candid and affable aficionado, Stoney has a tattoo of the team’s old alternate logo covering most of his right deltoid. He is partial to the word “daggum.” Raised about 25 miles west of Dallas in Hurt, he is a fourth-generation Texan. When I asked him how someone even gets into this as a hobby, Stoney said he’d just done it all his life. “My dad was a real cowboy; he rode bulls for a living,” the curator told me. “His favorite bull rider was named Stoney Burke. That’s who he named me after.

“Every weekend, he’d go out country and western dancing with my mom. And they’d meet with the babysitter and [ask me], ‘Stoney, what do you want us to bring you back?’ They’d always bring me back something. I always wanted football cards.”

Some of the items he picked up during his childhood years. Others he purchased as an adult. His son, Stoney Jr., mentioned that “it started off as one room,” back when he was still a kid. Often, Stoney and Diana will wake up in the morning to find a box of free memorabilia dropped off on the front porch. (He’s been known to receive tips from folks who think he’d be interested in a given item.) Estate sales are morbidly fruitful. 

When I asked Stoney how he felt about the current direction of the team, he didn’t deny that the past few decades had “a lot more hurt than good.” He’s still ticked off about how last year’s divisional game ended. “I was at the game,” he said, in a pecan-smoked accent. “Whenever [Dak] threw that interception and they ran it back for a touchdown, I got up and left and walked home. I knew it was over.”

He is, admittedly, even lower on this year’s squad. In his mind they just haven’t earned it. 

“If I’m going to spend $325 on a jersey, it’s going to be for a champion. Don’t get me wrong, now. I support these guys. I love them to death, and I want them to win. I’m there hollering every time. But they haven’t won nothing but a hat and a T-shirt.”

I wondered what it would take for him to ever step back from the team. He might not ever find full shelter in a house filled with Cowboy artifacts, but he might be able to bundle up in memories of yore. “It’s like a marriage. You got to be there when they win or when they lose,” he responded, without hesitation. “I’m True Blue. It’s America’s Team, man. I’ll back them no matter what.”

We sat down into a pair of plush love seats in the living room and chatted for a while longer. One of us brought up his daddy’s craft, bull riding, though I’m unsure exactly who. I’d hoped to see a rodeo in the days I had left in town, if I could find enough time. 

“Have you ever heard of Lane Frost?” Stoney asked me.

I told him I hadn’t. 

“Let me show you something real quick,” he said, reaching for a remote and opening his YouTube search tab.

“Lane Frost, he was a famous bull rider, right?”

“OK,” I responded.

“He was riding a bull in the rodeo,” Stoney continued. “And what happened was the bull killed him.”

“Jesus.”

A pixilated video filled up the screen, a doleful country tune lolling in the background.

“This is Lane Frost’s last ride,” Stoney said. 

A slim man in a Gus hat was affixed to a beast seven, eight times his size. In total the bull managed 13 jumps—each time kicking its hind legs out of soil tufts the color of its hide, up to a height equivalent to the rider’s head while mounted. From a few angles, when the animal’s back half whipped up off the ground, the cowboy was blocked out of view, like the sun in an eclipse. Each shot was in slow motion. The force and nature of each move were ruthlessly violent. The bull rider attempted to dismount but fell into the animal’s line of sight. 

“After he got bucked off,” Stoney continued, “the bull’s horn went up under his number tag on the back.”

I looked up later that Frost was gored and then trampled in the span of a second. He got up, first on his knees and then on his feet. He took a total of five wobbly steps, then fell to the ground before he could finish the sixth. 

“He actually stood up,” Stoney said in somber admiration, “before he collapsed and died.”

“Jesus,” I said, for the second time in half a minute. 

“People think football is tough,” the son of a cowboy told me. “Being a daggum rodeo cowboy is.”

Pops is patient zero. Favorite 88 is Irvin. Knows that Dez caught it. More than ready for Bill Belichick. Man refers to various 20-somethings on the squad as his “son,” even though he has multiple real ones, including me. 

The guy should know better. He does know better. Wise man said, “Can’t get fooled again.” 

Not after the wild-card loss back in ’99, or the drubbing in ’04 in Carolina, or the botched snap in ’06. Not after Cabo. No, never after Cabo! Equatorial cavorting before a playoff game! A wideout jogged away a game winner; Tony Romo threw a pick the next play.

I’ve got more losses. You don’t have more losses? A beatdown, 44-6, in that ’08 win-or-go-home finale. Can’t skip 34-3. Against a 41-year-old quarterback. Or maybe that regular-season choke job with the Calvin Johnson triple-coverage catch. Remember in 2012 when Dez had the game winner? Sixteen seconds left, Jerry World was rocking, a walk-off for the ages. Didn’t count: The man’s pinkie was out of bounds. 

Romo’s ’13 masterpiece that wasn’t a masterpiece, because at 48-48 and two minutes left, he just couldn’t help but throw it all away. I’m not doing the Dez catch. I can still see the Dez catch. The greatest play that should’ve been. 

I quit after Aaron Rodgers. Pops didn’t quit after Rodgers. Thirty-five-yard dagger, third-and-20, to lose another home playoff game. That one-possession loss to the 49ers (who could’ve known that the clock was about to expire???), followed by another one-possession loss to the 49ers (who could’ve known that the clock could still expire???). Had to call and check in after last year’s divisional shame. 

They are my father’s keeper. The playoff losses, the hat tosses, the screams echoing through the house, the moping, and always, the return within months, always finding a way back. Always pushed and always pulled. In October we watched Cowboys-Lions. Little bro, who’s 11 going on 30, sat in with us. 

It was clear early on that them ’boyz couldn’t get out of their own way. They took a lead with a field goal on their first possession, then promptly gave it up within two and a half minutes of the play. The next drive was peak Cowboys. Nine snaps, 63 yards, moving the ball downfield with precision. Seven yards from the end zone, Dak threw a pick. (Pops’s head was in his hand for the first, though not the only, time that day.)

Things fall apart. In Dallas they do. Detroit scored on its next four possessions; the Cowboys offense answered with a single field goal. On one of the commercial breaks, the Fox broadcast played A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation,” and the line was “Drive you insane / Drive you up the wall.”  

I asked whether anyone would rather watch play-by-play rookie and recent divorcé Tom Brady take snaps.

“Nah,” baby bro responded. Then he mulled it over. “Actually, kind of.” 

Dallas was down a smooth 21 points at the half. It’d never get closer for the rest of the game. Four straight offensive possessions went: fumble, interception, interception, fumble. Mr. Quarter Billion Dollars wrapped up the day with two picks and a 51 percent completion rate. I dipped after the second turnover, though not before the preteen said, “I didn’t wanna see it, but I knew it was gonna happen.” 

Pops, having heard the comment, seen the TV screen, and witnessed three decades of America’s Team, was none too pleased. If I didn’t know all parties involved better, I’d say a sliver of Cowboy Nation was really ready to leave. 

Lex Pryor

Lex writes about race, pop culture, and sports for The Ringer. His work has appeared in the ‘Year’s Best Sports Writing’ anthology. He lives in Harlem.