Sports

Dallas’ shortcomings rubbed in fans’ faces

DALLAS — Maybe this is the cost of doing Super business. From the moment Jerry Jones bought into the billionaire boys club that is the NFL, he wanted this extravaganza, needed it, pined for it. Back when his team was still quartered in Irving, in the old stadium with the hole in the top, the best way to get a Super Bowl was the traditional one.

Win yourself there.

Jones wanted more.

“One of these years, Dallas is going to be a destination place for the Super Bowl,” Jones said not long after his Cowboys won their third championship in four years back in 1996. “And we’re going to throw some kind of party, I can promise you that.”

Well, Dallas — Arlington, technically — gets the party now, and it comes as a Faustian bargain of the highest order. Not only did the Cowboys suffer through an endless season of purgatory, finishing dead last in the NFC, getting a coach canned midstream and spending weeks at a time as a laughingstock; now, when the Super Bowl finally does arrive, this is what the locals get to see next Sunday at Cowboys Stadium:

The Steelers on one sideline.

And the Packers on the other.

The Steelers — tamers (twice) of America’s Team during their 1970s heyday, responsible for an endless loop of Lynn Swann acrobatics and bless-his-heart-he’s-got-to-be-the-sickest-man-in-America Jackie Smith drops.

And the Packers — Ice Bowl victors, the team that held off Tom Landry’s Cowboys at the end of the ‘60s and helped coin those early Cowboys teams with their detested moniker of “Next Year’s Champions.”

OK. Now, the Cowboys have an enemies list as long as a mob turncoat’s, partly out of jealousy and envy and resentment, partly because they’ve been good enough, long enough to have gotten in the faces and spaces of a lot of franchises through the years.

And in truth, it might well have been even worse if any of their NFC East neighbors — in descending order the Redskins, Eagles, and Giants — were here. There is also a generation of Cowboys fans who hold a special distaste for Cleveland, since on the awful afternoon of Nov. 24, 1963, a stadium full of Browns fans taunted the Cowboys — and their city — as “Kennedy killers,” and in Texas resentments die hard.

Still …

“I’ve waited my whole life to see a Super Bowl in my own backyard,” a Cowboys fan named Larry Pfister said yesterday at the Draft Media Sports Lounge as he watched the Heat and the Thunder on TV. “And this is what I have to see? Is there any way the game can end in a tie?”

You know what this would be like, of course. Think of that Meadowlands Super Bowl in a couple of years, and think of it being a Patriots-Cowboys game, something that can sour the stomachs equally of Giants and Jets fans alike. Or think of being a Yankees fan in 1986 and seeing the Mets and Red Sox playing the World Series at Yankee Stadium. Or the Yankees and the Phillies playing the ‘09 Series at Citi Field.

Enemies in the backyard.

On either sideline.

“I knew it would be too much to ask the Cowboys to be the first team to get a home Super Bowl,” Pfister said. “I mean, there’s a reason it’s never happened before. The odds were against it.”

He sipped from his beer.

“But this?”

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com