Two days after his 50th birthday, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman pulls out of a Starbucks in an upscale shopping mall in Dallas’s Highland Park, heads towards today’s Cowboys practice, and talks about his GQ cover shoot from 1993. It was the summer after he’d won his first Super Bowl, and shortly after he suffered the back injury that helped cause him career-ending pain.

“When we were doing the shoot, I couldn’t move,” he says, “I was in back spasms. They propped me up against the wall.”

Aikman’s dressed head-to-toe in black athletic gear, his statuesque 6-foot-4 frame entirely too massive for the driver’s seat of his dark gray Range Rover. On the 23-year-old GQ cover, Aikman wears a boxy, double-breasted suit with a comically big pocket square. You can't see it looking at the photo, but Aikman was in a full sweat because of the pain, nearly 20 miles from where we are now, at the Cowboys’ old practice home in Valley Ranch.

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“When I got done, I couldn’t get the clothes off because I was in such bad spasms,” says Aikman, gearing the Range towards the Dallas Cowboys’ new facility in Frisco, Texas.

Troy Aikman sat at his locker after the shoot ended, clothes still on, thinking, Shit, I’m going to spend the night in here. He was the reigning Super Bowl MVP at twenty-six; he was the hero that had delivered America’s Team to their first championship in fifteen years; he was, as GQ dubbed him on its cover, “God’s Quarterback.” And he couldn’t get his pants off.

“Every time I see that cover,” Aikman says now, “I think about it.”

Two teammates came in and got him undressed. He would go on to get an MRI and discover he had a herniated disk. Surgery came days later. He’d play eight more years, the last of which would require shots to deal with the debilitating back pain. He’d win two more Super Bowls in the next three seasons. That shoot, in June of 1993, was the beginning and the end of Troy Aikman’s football career.

Dak Prescott was born in July.

Now the 23-year-old rookie quarterback has taken over the reins of the Cowboys franchise, improbably leading the 2016 team to a 13-3 record, an NFC East title, and a top seed in the playoffs. A fourth-round draft pick out of Mississippi State overlooked by almost everyone, Prescott has seized the opportunity that came in the wake of Tony Romo’s preseason back injury, dazzling while his predecessor—the guy who, at one point, seemed like he could be Aikman’s heir-apparent—carried a clipboard. In a press conference held November 15, a healthy 36-year-old Romo graciously ceded his starterdom to the younger Prescott.

Aikman was once that young prince. The first overall pick in the 1989 NFL Draft, and the first pick of a new Cowboys era under the recently consummated ownership of Arkansas oilman Jerry Jones, his team went 1-15 in his rookie year. He didn’t play in the Cowboys’ lone win and was among the lowest-rated starting quarterbacks in the NFL. In 1990, the Cowboys drafted running back Emmitt Smith and went 7-9. In 1991, they went 11-5. In the 1992-1993 season, they won the Super Bowl. Aikman threw for 273 yards, four touchdowns and no interceptions in that win. They repeated in the 1993-1994 season; won again in 1995-1996. And sure, it wasn’t that simple (it forgets the coaching genius of Jimmy Johnson; the importance of lesser known players like Mark Stepnoski, Daryl Johnston, and Jay Novacek; the particular brand of off-the-field impropriety that ultimately added to the '90s Cowboys legend). But memory draws its pictures with straight lines, making all points seem more directly connected than they really are. If Dak Prescott leads the Cowboys back to football’s promised land next month, then the revisionist lens of sports history won’t remember him as having taken over for Romo. Prescott will have taken the crown from Troy Aikman, current reigning savior.