IRVING, Texas - Like crows on a telephone wire, we keep a watchful eye on the soon-to-be road kill that is the 2008 Dallas Cowboys.

They twitch on the street. Every so often we swoop down and...peck, peck, peck.

Spooked they’re still alive, we return to the wire to watch. And wait.

They won’t get out of this alive, will they? Coaching staff intact, team-wide reputation rehabbed from underachievers to overachievers, lofty goals for 2008 somewhat realized...they can’t still pull all that off can they?

“Time heals wounds,” beleaguered Dallas coach Wade Phillips said Wednesday, referring to the time off the Cowboys have had since being disgraced in the Meadowlands by the Giants, 35-14 on Nov. 2.

His eyes forlorn, his thin, high-pitched drawl soft, Phillips acknowledged, “We got wounded a little bit in the first half of the season. But I think you take it all into perspective and say, ‘Hey, we can do something about the second half of the year, and we can look forward to that.’ That’s the direction we want to go.”

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Dallas, to be sure, is a long way from dead. Their margin for error’s been trimmed and they need a valiant run to even have a prayer at claiming the NFC East, but they are not badly positioned.

The clouds have broken a little bit. Perspective has been regained. The toxic levels of distress and chaos are low. Heading into a critical game against the 6-3 Redskins on Sunday night, even-minded Cowboys, lunchpail Cowboys like Bobby Carpenter, Bradie James, Jay Ratliff and Leonard Davis believe that now everyone will find out what the Cowboys are all about. For better or worse.

“It’s never as good as it seems and it’s certainly never as bad as it seems,” said Carpenter. “Somewhere in the middle, your reality lies. Are we as great as we were said to be in the beginning? Probably not. Are we as bad as things have been going lately? Definitely not. We have an opportunity now. We’re above .500 in the most difficult division in football. The teams that we can catch are all right there. We get a chance to play them all. I think that bodes well for our success.”

The distractions and adverse situations Dallas has dealt with — many of them self-created — have taken a toll on the team. Pacman Jones’ escapades, Terrell Owens’ tirades, Tony Romo’s injury, handwringing about Romo’s backups — fixation on those things took away from the football team focusing on football.

Which, in part, explains why they’ve been prone to crunch-time penalties and blown assignments or — as was the case in 2007 — an outright meltdown at the season’s end. They are not mentally tough. Or at least haven’t been. Are some individuals? Certainly. But toughness and resilience are not part of their overall team personality. So far, at least.