It's hard to imagine that Jerry Jones pictured this when he strongarmed the NFL into holding the Super Bowl at his Xanadu this season.
Surely he imagined his Cowboys having their crowning moment on their home field on a sunny day with his pleasure dome gleaming like the future of everything good and noble in the world. Instead he got a matchup between two teams whose appearance in this game solidifies their place above the Cowboys in the historical pecking order. And his stadium has been an afterthought thanks to ice, snow and a million thin-skinned writers ticked off that they aren't in Miami.
That's obviously not what Double J wanted, but there's really not much reason he should have thought things were going to go his way. It didn't take an ice storm to turn this season into something bleak enough to be the plot for a Bergman film. You had the humiliating season opener, the 1-7 start, Wade Phillips's firing, Tony Romo's injury, Dez Bryant's injury and everything else that contributed to the Cowboys going from preseason Super Bowl contenders to punchlines.
Maybe all of this is karma for Jones playing one of the leading Cold Miser roles in the labor battle that's almost certainly going to lead to a lockout next month. More likely it's just a combination of too much hype and a rare weather pattern, but there's still one way that Jones can salvage a win out of the whole mess.
If Sunday's game is as good as many people believe it will be, no one will remember the iced-over streets or businesses left short on the profits they hoped to ring up with the circus in town. The fact that the Packers and Steelers are gold-plated franchises actually helps Jones because it will lift the memory of the game should it turn out to be closely contested. Since the NFL is a quarterback's league, the presence of Ben Roethlisberger and Aaron Rodgers also helps as it can go down as a duel for the ages.
That means it will be heavily replayed on the NFL Network and in highlight films, especially if the next season takes longer to get going because of a lockout. Every time the game gets shown, Double J's monument to himself football will be on center stage, looking every inch like the kind of place that exists to host the biggest and best sporting events on the planet.
Should the game be as big of a dog as the week preceding it, however, it might be a good idea for Jones to lock himself in his house. The chances of a piano falling on his head or a rogue wave lifting out of the ocean and washing him away would be just too great.
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