This is Us is a wonderful show. It may be the best show on television. It's easily the best on network TV. But I am mad at This Is Us, because of its recent season premiere.

It was undeniably moving and tear-jerky as This Is Us episodes often are. But as a football fan, it left me angry, as in, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"

This Is Us often includes flashbacks to its lead characters growing up in Pittsburgh. The recent season premiere of this Emmy-winning blockbuster showed a landmark moment in Pittsburgh Steelers history — Franco Harris catching the pass dubbed the Immaculate Reception, on Dec. 23, 1972, that led to a playoff victory over the Oakland Raiders.

Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia in This is Us. (Ron Batzdorff / NBC)

This annoyed me, because as a lifelong fan of the Dallas Cowboys, I am tired of our team being used only as scapegoats or villains in pop-culture lore. This is us, and I don't like it!

The Cowboys were the villains in the 2012 movie Silver Linings Playbook, which glorified the Philadelphia Eagles, who, in a dramatic plot twist intertwined with a dance competition, score a 44-6 victory over the Cowboys and Tony Romo in a real game played in 2008. As a headline in this newspaper proclaimed: "Cowboys bashing in Hollywood continues with Silver Linings Playbook."

Bradley Cooper plays the lead character, whose father, played by Robert De Niro, can no longer attend Eagles home games because he'd cracked open the heads of too many Cowboys fans in the past. Security won't let him in. So, in this example, we're both whipping boys and victims of violence.

Bradley Cooper, dressed as an Eagles fan, in a scene from the movie Silver Linings Playbook. (JoJo Whilden / The Associated Press)

The Cowboys were even the villains in a 1994 kids' movie, Little Giants. The Giants are the team of underdog heroes, while the star-on-their-helmets Cowboys are, of course, the team everyone hates with nothing but bullies on the roster. The Cowboys played a prominent role in the terrific 1996 comedy Jerry Maguire, but only as the team that Jerry's client — who played for the Arizona Cardinals — helped defeat.

I have written before about how hatred of the Cowboys swept the nation like a virus in the wake of President John Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, in 1963.

And then it got worse three years later when the Cowboys fielded a winning team after six years of mediocrity. Starting in 1966, they ran off 20 consecutive winning seasons, which remains a remarkable milestone. During that period, which ended in 1985, they appeared in five Super Bowls, winning two.

Cowboys hatred grew dramatically worse in 1978, when NFL Films decided to name the annual Cowboys highlight film "America's Team." The ill-advised label still lingers, making the Cowboys an object of scorn from Miami to Seattle and every goal post in between.

But what annoys and mystifies me even more is how the Cowboys never end up as heroes in those glowing pop-culture examples. Where's the Cowboys version of Silver Linings Playbook? Why are the Cowboys the villains in Little Giants? Why isn't there a Cowboys version of This Is Us? Why are the Cowboys always the anti-hero?

I have decided that the reason the Cowboys are rarely if ever depicted heroically in movies or TV shows is because no one has written the script. So, starting today, I am changing that.

I am writing a play, based on my own real-life experience. On Dec. 28, 1975, I was hovering in my Ratso Rizzo apartment in icepick-cold Anchorage, Alaska, where my buddy Paul showed up that morning to brave my overactive radiator and share a Cowboys playoff game with me, albeit under odd circumstances.

Dallas Cowboys receiver Drew Pearson, No. 88, catches the famous "Hail Mary" pass from Roger Staubach. (AP)

Dallas was playing the Minnesota Vikings. Paul hated the Cowboys, so he rooted against them. Hard. Given the four-hour time difference in those days between Anchorage and Minnesota, kickoff happened at 7:30 in the morning, Anchorage time. We drank stout black coffee, all the while squinting to make out the fuzzy picture on my 8-inch black and white television, whose broken rabbit ears struggled to reel in Channel 11, the CBS affiliate in Alaska's largest city.

The Cowboys trailed most of the game, so Paul was having a blast — until the final 24 seconds.

Dallas had the ball on the 50-yard line. Roger Staubach went back to pass and threw what became known as the "Hail Mary" to Drew Pearson. Dallas wins! Staubach, a lifelong Catholic, gets the credit for having chiseled the term into football nomenclature, proclaiming in the post-game interview: "I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary."

Within seconds, my dad in Dallas called me in Anchorage to celebrate.

It was my own touching NFL moment, one I'll never forget.

But in the play, I take it one step further. Moments after the game, the lead character sees the girl next door, the one he has a crush on, to whom he's barely said a word. She asks, "How was the game?" As for what happens next, well, you'll have to see the play.

It's a scene I'd like to see, but never have, of course, because the Cowboys never get the casting call that has come so lovingly for the Steelers, Eagles, Giants and Cardinals, who, frankly, don't deserve it any more than the Cowboys. Even less! When did those teams corner the market on romanticism?

When it comes to being cast as villains and not heroes, it is, for our Cowboys, yet another case of "this is us." And I'm not gonna take it anymore.