Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1996

Ah Brett Favre leading his Packers into Texas Stadium for a late-season showdown with the Cowboys in a possible NFC Championship Game preview between the two best teams in the conference.

Obviously, the year is 1996. Monica Lewinsky is still surfing the carpet of the Oval Office and the world is blissfully none-the-wiser. There are few cell phones and no IPods. Lance Armstrong is riddled with cancer and his prognosis looks bleak. Bob Dole is triumphant in defeat. Where have you gone, Admiral Stockdale?

The Pack and the 'Boys have played each other only twice in the last ten years, which is strange, because during the 90's, when each team had a run as the premier franchise of the NFC, they played almost every year during the regular season, and three years in a row, from '93-'95, in the playoffs.

Of course, that is an era of the Green Bay/Dallas rivalry that Cheeseheads would like to obliterate from their cerebral cheddar cortexes. In the ten games played between the two teams in the 90's, the Cowboys won nine of the them. From 1993-97, they played seven of those games, and Dallas won them all.

The signature game of that stretch, and indeed of the Packers/Cowboys rivalry in the 90's, was the 1995 NFC Championship game, played in January of '96, and won by Dallas en route to their win over the Steelers in Super Bowl XXX. Favre, who later won his first of three straight MVP awards, was stellar in the game, throwing for two scores, but he was outdone by the Big Three, Aikman (2 TD passes), Irvin (2 TD's) and Emmit (2 TD's). In the fourth quarter, Larry Brown gave everyone a Super Bowl preview, intercepting Favre to set up the Cowboys' last scoring drive.

The next season, '96, the Pack won the Super Bowl, but they still couldn't get the Dallas monkey off their back, losing to the 'Boys 21-7 in a marquee, week 12, Monday Night Championship game rematch that was the regular season game of the year (seven Chris Boniol field goals for Dallas in that one, tying the NFL record). Indeed, one could argue that the only reason the Pack won their Super Bowl that year was because Carolina beat Dallas in the Divisional Playoff. Barry Switzer and the Big Three had Green Bay's number at that point for sure, and had they gotten past the Panthers, they would have headed into Lambeau with a world of confidence.

Green Bay finally exorcised the Dallas demon in '97, throttling the Cowboys 45-17 on a 4-TD afternoon from Favre. The game ended what was at that point an eight-game losing streak to the silver and white, and transported Cheeseheads everywhere back to those glorious Ice Bowl days of yore, when Lombardi's warriors used to push around Landry's laundrymen like the upstart sissies that they were.