"It is a loss that really hurts," Owens said, his tears shielded by a pair of dark glasses.

This season ended pretty much the way last season ended for the Cowboys, with the ball coming out of quarterback Tony Romo's hand and ending up where it didn't do Dallas any good.

In the playoffs against the Seattle Seahawks a year ago, Romo botched the hold on a game-winning field goal and was stopped short of scrambling the ball into the end zone.

Yesterday, Romo had the Cowboys driving in the final seconds, within striking range of a game-winning touchdown, but his final throw of the day, a floater into the end zone, was intercepted and the curtain fell with a thud.

"It didn't look like it had any steam on it," Dallas coach Wade Phillips said.

And with that the New York Giants had beaten the Cowboys, 21-17, to advance to the NFC title game next Sunday in balmy Green Bay, Wis.

For the Cowboys, who won the NFC East with a 13-3 record, it was a sudden and surprising ending. It also marked the 11th straight season without a postseason win for Dallas.

"When you're the quarterback and you don't win, it's a tough pill to swallow," Romo said. "We did too many things that hurt us - penalties and things that allowed them to stay on the field and made us get off the field."

There will be critics who wonder if Romo used up all the steam on his passes during his quickie vacation to Mexico with babe-friend Jessica Simpson last weekend. Cowboys fans apparently wanted the quarterback to sequester himself at Valley Ranch and watch tapes of Troy Aikman for excitement.

Owens claims he bought the plane tickets to Cabo for Romo and Simpson, as an apology for calling Simpson "a distraction" when she attended the Eagles' upset of the Cowboys in December.

If anyone knows about being a distraction, it is Owens, so he must have been right. More than Simpson's presence ailed the Cowboys late in the season, however. The offense stopped scoring, and the defense wasn't as opportunistic. Yesterday was just the final proof that the Cowboys are getting good, but they aren't all the way there yet.

Romo shrugged off the questions about his southern excursion yesterday.

"I thought I made the right decision," he said. "I didn't want to really see anyone, and I thought it was a good decision not to go to Vegas and drink for two or three days."

Even without hearing a question, the whole matter set off Owens. Maybe he has buyer's remorse on the plane tickets or something, but he went full-tilt wacky, which, by his standards, is pretty wacky.

"This wasn't about Tony. You can talk about him, you can talk about the vacation, but it's unfair. That's my teammate. That's my quarterback," Owens said, breaking into sobs and tenderly drawing out the word quarterback.

"I've always had a good relationship with quarterbacks," he said. "I know what type of person I am on the inside. I know who I am."

Paging Drs. Garcia and McNabb. The patient is not responding normally.

The outcome yesterday was particularly maddening for the Cowboys, particularly hard to take, because the Giants didn't do all that much to win. They managed themselves very well, made few mistakes, and hoped the other team wasn't as efficient. It was the formula that worked in the wild-card round against Tampa Bay, and it worked against the Cowboys, too.

Eli Manning threw just 18 passes, and the Giants' offense possessed the ball for only 23 minutes, 30 seconds. The biggest boost for New York came just before the half, when the Cowboys went soft on defense and let Manning direct a 71-yard drive in 40 seconds to tie the score at 14. All the momentum Dallas had built with a pair of massive drives for touchdowns was erased, and it never returned.

Part of the reason was that Owens, playing with a still-bothersome sprained ankle, wasn't as explosive as usual. Without that big-play weapon, the Cowboys became the Eagles. They had an effective running back in Marion Barber and a quarterback trying to find an open receiver. They made the game harder on themselves by starting almost every drive with lousy field position. Throw in a couple of stupid penalties and you have the same combination that killed the Eagles a half-dozen times this season. Yesterday, it got the Cowboys.

"We didn't play well enough. That's the bottom line," Phillips said. "We played hard enough, but I wanted us to play a lot better."

The Cowboys were capable of that for much of the season, but the magic slipped away in the last month and, at least yesterday, there was no easy answer to where it went. That was a project for another day.

"We'll go back and watch the film," Romo said, another season having slipped from his hands. "Maybe."

at 215-854-5842 or bford@phillynews.com.

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