The Dallas Cowboys superstar stood in front of a group of expectant reporters, battled back his deep disappointment and got choked up.

“That’s my quarterback,” warbled Terrell Owens.

It was 2008, so long ago that there was hardly a Twitter audience around to make a meme out of it. Owens’ quarterback was Tony Romo, who was being blamed for a playoff loss to the New York Giants only a year after he was blamed for another playoff loss, in Seattle, when he fumbled a field-goal snap.

View photos Tony Romo said the Cowboys are Dak Prescott’s team to lead now. (AP) More

Owens did his best to stand up for the 27-year-old passer. Romo did his best to shrug it off. “I don’t live with regrets,” he said at the time.

That statement is up against the ultimate test now, as he’s the backup to rookie Dak Prescott after a back injury suffered in the preseason has kept him out all season. Romo waited years to be in a position to lead Dallas on the field after going undrafted in 2003 – he was a holder for two seasons – and then he waited even longer after the botched hold in Seattle for a greater chance to get the Cowboys back to the Super Bowl. Now, finally, his team is good enough at 8-1 and he’s watching from the sideline. It’s as if he trained a thoroughbred from birth, wrangled him into the starting gate at Churchill Downs, and then choked on dust as the horse took off with another rider.

The inability to play is tough enough, but that’s not rare in football. What’s rare is a quarterback leading one team for this long and then losing a golden chance toward the end of a career. Tom Brady and Peyton Manning got to the end of their rainbows, as did John Elway.

Romo’s pain, expressed in a news conference on Tuesday, is not just at being out. It’s at being out while the only team he has ever known is in. He used terms like “soul-crushing,” “a tremendous amount of guilt,” “a dark place,” and “almost feel like an outsider.” Romo isn’t just seeing his situation in a vacuum; he’s seeing it in the context of the team he loves, after so many close calls. He doesn’t want to merely win a title; he wants to win a title with Dallas.

As emotional as this is, it will likely get tougher. If Prescott wins it all, Romo will know that the rookie got his team where he couldn’t. If Prescott fails, he’ll probably feel even worse – wondering if he could have done it, wondering if he should have done it, wondering if he could have better helped the rookie do it.

Then there’s the next step. There will almost certainly be a market for Romo’s services somewhere else. It’s easy to imagine him with the New York Jets, or the Chicago Bears, or the San Francisco 49ers. But it’s very difficult for Romo himself to envision that. He is the consummate Cowboy – the guy who went down in a game in Philadelphia last September and hurried back to the sideline in a sling to help call a touchdown pass for Brandon Weeden. “I’m standing on the sideline,” receiver Terrence Williams said that day, “and he knew on third down that they were going to run Cover 1. He got Scott [Linehan] to call the play.”

The team was still his team then, even in his absence. It’s not the same now. He knows it, and surely he knows some fans want the Prescott Express to roll into the next decade. Even on Sunday, in a hostile city, there were dozens of No. 4 jerseys in the stands.

View photos Dak Prescott has led the Cowboys to an 8-1 mark. (AP) More

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