At the beginning of the season, I blazed a trail to Cowboys headquarters in Frisco to talk to fans about the upcoming season.

I talked to fans who were waiting outside to get in and see the first practice.

“With Dak and Jason Witten, this team will finally go deep into the playoffs,” was a common theme.

The Cowboys may have fallen just short of that goal. And lo, the saga of Jason Garrett has come to an end.

Garrett showed up in DFW a few years before me, but he was an assistant initially. He was named head coach shortly after I moved here.

The Cowboys, you see, found it unacceptable that Wade Phillips had started the 2010 season 1-7.

“I’m from Ohio,” I explained to anyone who would listen. “Is 1-7, like, not acceptable? I ask because that happens all the time back home.”

I vaguely recall one Sunday in college, my associates and I gathered ’round the TV because the Bengals, if they won their last game and then Pittsburgh lost… and then a series of other events occurred, including a wormhole opening up just beyond Jupiter’s orbit or the Mongols deciding to get back to their roots and invade China [but not both the Mongols and the wormhole], the Bengals would make the playoffs.

The Bengals lost that game, though, so it meant nothing when that wormhole opened up.

From Back in the Day, I remember Garrett winning his first game as interim head coach. Several Cowboys fans worked in the newsroom back at WBAP. They seemed excited about Jason Garrett at first. He took the Cowboys to the brink of mediocrity, going 5-3 the rest of the year.

But, listen, every public figure needs their calling card. Being just okay became Garrett’s Thing. I even took up this same issue back in 2014, suggesting Cowboys fans and Jerry Jones go to couples’ counseling because the fans were afraid of getting hurt again.

Last Friday, the scuttlebutt was that Garrett’s contract wouldn’t get renewed. Our news director gently warned us against speculating without getting some information from our partners at The Fan.

Naturally, that morning, I was assigned to speculate. I tried not to.

“The Cowboys haven’t said anything,” I’d use as the lead sentence to introduce my piece. “But let’s just say, hypothetically, Garrett’s time with the Cowboys is coming to an end.”

Then I looked up his history and talked about that. Garrett had stuck around long enough to become the Cowboys’ second longest tenured coach [trailing only Tom Landry’s hat].

But he had only won a total of two playoff games in nine seasons. He was 8-8 four times in those nine years.

“Eight and eight is an amazing year!” I’d tell those fans from the perspective of someone who grew up in an area where your choices were the Bengals and Browns. “They almost made the playoffs!”

Jerry Jones was eavesdropping. Never content, he interviewed Marvin Lewis to see if he could take the Cowboys to the next level of mediocrity. He settled for former Packers coach Mike McCarthy, though.

Then we went inside to see the cheerleaders practice. There’s a chance, an outside chance, Lewis might have been out of his element with the Cowboys. They had this festival at The Star just to celebrate the start of practice.

Back in Ohio, meanwhile, it wasn’t terribly uncommon [especially if the Reds had a good year] for no one to pay attention to the Bengals until we all realized they were already 1-7.