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DAN SHAUGHNESSY

The Patriots are the new sheriff in town

Bill Belichick is 3-0 against the Cowboys.Charles Krupa/Associated Press

IRVING, Texas — When American Airlines Flight 1583 from Boston touched down in the Texas prairie Friday morning, a flight attendant welcomed the passengers to Dallas/Fort Worth, thanked us for flying American, then said, “Go Patriots!’’ and played “Dirty Water” over the speaker system.

Just about everyone on board roared in approval. A sprinkling of fans in Cowboys garb slinked into their seats and said nothing.

“How ’bout them Patriots?!’’

The axis of power has shifted dramatically in NFL America. There was a time when the Cowboys were America’s Team, God’s Team, the North Dallas Forty, and perennial Super Bowl contenders. They had the iconic Lone Star logo. Their owner was a caricature of new money and old ego. The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders were subjects of books and a television movie. The Cowboys were the gold standard in the NFL; the ultimate brand in America’s new national pastime. The Cowboys were pro football’s Yankees. You either loved them or you hated them. No one was neutral.

Sunday afternoon in the preposterous House That Jerry Jones Built, the Cowboys will be mere props in their own ginormous stadium. Playing before as many as 100,000 people (capacity is 85,000, but with standing room they’ve cracked the 100,000 mark) and a national television audience, the Cowboys on Sunday will exist solely for the purpose of allowing the New England Patriots to demonstrate their perfection and superiority in all matters football.

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In 2015, the Patriots are what the Cowboys used to be. They are the bullies. They have the sweet prime-time TV slots and the billionaire owner who needs to be noticed and loved at all times. They have the smartest coach with his signature piece of clothing (the Landry fedora yields to the Belichick hoodie). They have appeared in an NFL-high eight Super Bowls (a record they share with the Cowboys and Steelers). They are the envy of all other franchises. And they are hated almost everywhere outside of their own region.

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It’s amazing how anticipation for this game has changed since the NFL schedule came out last spring. For a long time we thought this was going to be a tough game for New England. It looked like it might be Tony Romo vs. Jimmy Garoppolo at quarterback. Playing on the road, without Tom Brady, figured to make the Patriots vulnerable.

But that was before Judge Richard Berman (did he get any autographs during the appeal hearing?) put Brady back on the field and the Patriots commenced the Revenge Tour. Meanwhile, every team in the Patriots’ path to Super Bowl 50 has paid for its sins and succumbed to the Deflategate Curse. Now Brady is on a Wyatt Earp vendetta ride and hell is coming with him. The Cowboys of mid-October are a shell of what we thought they would be. Romo has a broken collarbone. Their best wideout (Dez Bryant) and running back (Lance Dunbar) are sidelined. They have lost two in a row. How ’bout them ’Boys being 8½-point ’Dogs? At home.

The Patriots are 4-7 all time against the Cowboys, and the timeline of their matchups nicely demonstrates the shift of power among NFL kingpins. Prior to 1999, the Patriots could never beat Dallas. They met seven times and the Cowboys won them all. Pete Carroll’s Patriots snapped the streak in 1999, and Bill Belichick’s Patriots have beaten the Cowboys three times in three meetings in this century — the last coming at Gillette Stadium in 2011. The Patriots have never played in AT&T Stadium (a.k.a. Jerrassic Park), the $1.15 billion, city-owed monstrosity with the world’s largest high-definition videoboard.

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It will be interesting to see if road-tripping Patriots fans can plant the New England flag in the Cowboys’ giant stadium. The Patriots travel well. They annually take over at Sun Life when the Elvises play the Fish in Miami, and no one who was there will ever forget last Dec. 7 when they turned San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium into Gillette West as Patriots Nation took over a game played 3,000 miles from home. A few years ago, when the Red Sox were still good, Boston routinely took over ballparks from Baltimore to Tampa. Now it’s the hard-partying folks in Gronk-mobiles.

Making a dent in the din of Dallas would have been unthinkable in earlier times, but there’s a new world order in the NFL and almost no one gives the Cowboys a chance Sunday. Eight of eight Dallas Morning News “experts” picked the Patriots to win.

“The Patriots are what the Cowboys used to be in the 1990s,’’ wrote Rainer Sabin.

The Patriots are averaging 39.7 points per game and the Cowboys are wounded, slumping, and downright demoralized. Even Roger Staubach’s daughter acknowledges she has “mixed emotions” about rooting for any team featuring domestic abuse poster man Greg Hardy.

Convicted on two counts of domestic abuse, Dallas’s defensive lineman has served his four-game suspension (same penalty Brady was given for being “generally aware” of a football-deflating scheme) and returned in a blaze of disgrace last week, making inappropriate remarks about Brady’s wife as he discussed the Patriots’ visit. Hardy was subsequently admonished by Cowboys coach Jason Garrett. On Friday, Jennifer Staubach Gates, a member of Dallas’s Domestic Violence Task Force, told the Dallas Morning News that she would have “mixed emotions” when Hardy takes the field on Sunday.

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Hanging out in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex for the last couple of days, I get no sense that anybody here thinks their team has a chance. It’s amazing. The NFL torch has been passed, and even deep in the heart of Texas the once-vaunted Cowboys are expected to be just another tomato can for the marquee team of the National Football League, the mighty New England Patriots.


Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at dshaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Dan_Shaughnessy.