On Sunday, the Green Bay Packers lock horns with their hated rival, the Dallas Cowboys.  Yes, that’s right: “hated rival.”  While many outsiders consider only the Bears and Vikings when they think of Packer foes, loyal followers of the Green and Gold find it difficult to cast their eyes upon the blue star logo of the so-called “America’s Team” without vomiting.

The long history of these organizations includes NFL Championship games following the 1966 and 1967 campaigns, earning the rights to pay in Super Bowls I and II respectively.  (Spoiler alert: All four were won by the Packers.)  The 1967 game was the famed Ice Bowl, attended by my grandparents, and won by the Packers on a last-second Bart Starr quarterback sneak.  (In the seat next to my grandparents was a female Dallas fan in open-toed shoes–the temperature at game time was -13.  She left at halftime.) The rivalry became particularly nasty in 1995.  The Cowboys under Jimmy Johnson had ruled the early nineties.  But Johnson had difficulty getting along with Jerry Jones, Dallas’s sleazy oilman owner and left the team after his second straight Super Bowl championship in 1993.  Jones replaced him with the gun-toting and, by some accounts, impotent Barry Switzer.  The Packers, by contrast, were a team on the rise.  They’d upset the heavily favored San Francison 49ers in the divisional playoff and arrived in Dallas for the championship, loose and confident. The game was an utter streetfight, fought in the trenches.  At one point, the late, great Reggie White had visible blood on his face from where Cowboy Tackle Erik Williams was illegally clawing his face. When Reggie complained, the referee told him to “stop whining.”  Near the end of the first half, Williams dealt a despicable cut-block cheap shot to the Packers’ defensive tackle, John Jurkovic, injuring the Eastern Illinois alumnus’s knee and sending him to the sidelines spitting profanity at Williams and the Dallas faithful.  Brett Favre threw two third quarter touchdown passes to give the Packers the lead.  But the Cowboys responded with a long, soul-crushing run-heavy drive that won the game for them in the fourth quarter.  At the time, I thought the poor officiating cost Green Bay the game.  Now, I think that, though the officiating wasn’t going to win any awards, the Packers simply lost a brawl with a bigger, nastier bunch of dudes.  (By the way, the game was notable for perhaps one of the most bizarre, partisan, and strange bits of announcing I’d ever heard.  A ridiculously pro-Dallas Madden and Summerall voiced a broadcast so ridiculous that the following year when Madden came to Green Bay, Packer fans would shout at him and his dopey “Madden Cruiser”: “Hey Madden!  What do you think of your Cowboys now?”  Madden pretended to not know what they meant.)

The following year, through a suspicious scheduling fluke, the Packers were required to travel again to Dallas for a regular season game, a Monday Night affair.  This would be the third consecutive regular season matchup between the two teams in Texas Stadium.  Again, the Cowboys prevailed.  Again, they demonstrated the poor sportsmanship and douchebaggery that’s become the organization’s hallmark.  Having won the game, the Cowboys ran all the time off the clock, then brought their field goal kicker out for one last, meaningless field goal.  The reason was ostensibly to give Chris Boniol an NFL record-tying seventh field goal.  But it was difficult to see it as anything other than a slap in the Packers’ faces.  After it was kicked, Reggie White and LeRoy Butler marched to the Dallas sideline to confront the gloating bad winners–a discussion that ended with Reggie laying down this challenge: “Come to Lambeau!”

The Cowboys finally did come to Lambeau in November of 1997.  Though close in the first half, Green Bay went to town in the second.  Coach Holmgren had constructed a brilliant strategy to run Dorsey Levens right at the Cowboys’ flashy but tackle-impaired cornerback Deion Sanders.  Levens ran for 190 yards and score and the Packers settled the grudge, 45-17.  What a beautiful autumn day that was.

In true classless Cowboy fashion though, Dallas refused to acknowledge the significance of the victory.  While admitting he’d had his “butt whooped,” Michael Irvin–lately seen making a fool out of himself on Dancing with Stars–said that “you don’t prove anything in Green Bay in December.”  You only prove something in San Diego, he said (the location of Super Bowl XXXII).

Well, only one team won the NFC Championship that year and they were not wearing blue and white.