Thursday

Equipment manager Mike McCord and his assistant, Bucky Buchanan, stand beside carts on opposite sides of the locker room, peeling stars from helmets. Before each game McCord and Buchanan pull the stars and the stripes off each Cowboy helmet, clean the surface with rubbing alcohol and carefully place a new star above each earhole. They then lay a white tape stripe down the middle of the helmet and flank it with two blue stripes.

"The helmet has a silver shell, and the paint over it is an epoxy that has shiny, glitterlike stuff in it," says McCord. "The helmets look particularly good when the sun hits them or when they're under lights at a night game." The clean-cut simplicity of the Cowboys ' five-pointed logo, combined with its metallic radiance, is one of the main reasons that products adorned with the Dallas logo sell like mad—that and the fact that the Cowboys are once again winners, with colorful stars like Michael Irvin on the roster.

With practice over, Irvin climbs into his black Mercedes convertible, the one that Alvin Harper crashed only a few weeks ago. It has already been restored to its august splendor, which includes a vanity plate reading PLY MKR. Irvin accelerates into the Texas gloaming. In a red-checked jacket, black turtleneck, shades and abundant gold jewelry, he is full of the rapture that comes with being the cock of the walk, the big dog, the warrior, himself. The rapper Scarface blasts from the CD player as the star wide receiver drives with his knees, gesturing grandly with both hands as he talks. "Man, top down, I'm feeling good" he says. "Nothing like it. Driving through Dallas , everybody can see you. Makes it all worthwhile."

At the Christmas tree tent in the Vista Ridge Mall, the salespeople watch as guard Derek Kennard; his wife, Denise; and their children, Derek Jr., Denisha and Devon Jay, drive up to buy a Christmas tree. Derek Jr. is hobbled by an injury to his left ankle sustained while playing Pop Warner football, but otherwise the Kennards are in fine holiday spirit.

" 'Tis the season to be jolly," says Papa Derek, as trees are placed in front of the family for appraisal. Being a rather large man—320 pounds, to be precise—Kennard would seem a natural to play Santa Claus at this time of year. At the suggestion he wrinkles his nose under his wire-rimmed glasses, but not in merriment. "I don't do Santa," he says. "Well, I did it in 1989 with the Cardinals, for the team party. But I didn't have a good time doing it. I'm not built like Santa. No m�s. That was the one and only. It wasn't me."

The Kennards select a nice, full tree and drive off, ready for whatever the real Santa might bring.

The 1,500-piece puzzle rests in its box at Jason Garrett 's feet. Jason and his wife, Brill, a criminal lawyer, bought the puzzle a couple of months ago, thinking it might be a fun way to pass the time, finding tree branches, clouds and bricks and slowly assembling them into a scene just like the one on the cover of the box. But Jason grew bored after putting together about six pieces, and Brill, who met Jason at Princeton in 1985 during their freshman year and married him last May, encountered another dilemma. "We had it on the kitchen table," she says. "So when it was there, we could either do the puzzle or we could eat."

The Garretts' apartment off MacArthur Boulevard is so small—the whole place, bedroom, bathroom and living room/kitchen area, is no larger than Jerry Jones 's office—that something had to go. Food stayed.

Jason, the 28-year-old Ivy Leaguer with the curly, iridescent red hair, had thrown exactly 24 passes in the NFL when he was called on to start the Thanksgiving Day game against the Green Bay Packers after both Troy Aikman and Rodney Peete went down with injuries in the previous game, against the Washington Redskins . Audiences assembled around holiday dinner tables expected to see the nationally televised dismemberment of a nice guy in the wrong line of work. (Brill, who couldn't bear to see the game in person, watched it on TV from the first-aid room at Texas Stadium .) Instead, what everyone saw was Garrett leading the Cowboys to a thrilling come-from-behind 42-31 victory.

"Now, of course, I get constant grief from the players," says the soft-spoken and self-effacing Garrett . "You know, regardless of how big or small the opportunity is, you should take advantage of it. I did, and I feel good about that. But you know what I think? Honestly? I think it's embarrassing for me. I see these guys on my team, and they do it every week. Troy does it all the time."