FRISCO, Texas _ Everywhere in Dallas, Cowboys fans proudly wore their T-shirts, jerseys and caps on Monday, and water-cooler talk centered around the hometown NFL team.
No one predicted the Cowboys would own the league's best record nine games in.
"That's great to hear," Cowboys tight end Jason Witten said Monday while serving an early Thanksgiving meal at The Salvation Army in Dallas. "It really is. It really goes to a lot of hard work, and the way we've played and through success, through adversity but, you know, I don't know if I've ever been exactly in this point very often, but I have had a lot of success and been a part of teams that have had a lot of success. Our job is just to acknowledge that and say, 'Hey we've been here before. There's a lot of football left to be played. We need to continue to approach it like we've done the first nine weeks,' and I think this football team will do that."
The New England Patriots' loss to the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday night left the Cowboys as the only team with one loss. The Cowboys likely will sit atop The Associated Press power poll when it's released Tuesday.
Instead of talking about the Cowboys' team-record-tying, eight-game winning streak, though, rookie quarterback Dak Prescott lamented the lone loss.
"Sounds great," Prescott said at The Salvation Army in Fort Worth. "I wish we didn't have that one loss, but it's about going on to the next. Right now, it's Baltimore."
The Cowboys' 20-19 loss to the New York Giants in the season opener remains the only blemish. Since then, Dallas has reeled off eight consecutive victories, including three fourth-quarter or overtime comebacks, in matching the 1977 Cowboys as the only other with eight wins in a row in a single season.
Their latest miracle _ a 35-30 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers _ included seven lead changes and the teams combining for three touchdowns in the final two minutes.
It ranks among the most memorable regular-season comebacks in history, alongside the 41-35 win over the Washington Redskins in 1999, the 34-31 victory over the Rams in 2014, the 35-34 win over the Redskins in 1979, the 34-31 triumph over the San Francisco 49ers in 2005 and the 24-23 victory over the Redskins in 1974, among others.
The Cowboys trailed on their two final drives late in the fourth quarter against the Steelers. They went 75 yards on both, scoring on a 14-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott with 1:55 remaining and a 32-yard run by Elliott with 9 seconds left.
Jason Garrett couldn't remember many other games like it in his 17 years as a player, assistant coach and head coach with the Cowboys.
"If I have, there certainly haven't been many of them like that," Garrett said. "I thought that was the best thing we did in the game: We just kept playing. It's a point of emphasis we make with our team in almost everything we do is to keep playing and to finish.
"There were a lot of things we had to overcome throughout that ballgame. I thought our team did a good job of continuing to play, continuing to fight, continuing to battle with the unit, throughout the unit, across the team. Ultimately, we executed well enough at the end of the game to win it."
