AMERICA'S REAL TEAM

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A foot of snow two weeks ago left Green Bay, Wisconsin, with a white Christmas and the Packers with a problem: Lambeau Field had to be cleared to prepare it for the National Football Conference divisional playoff game on Jan. 4. So Ted Eisenreich, the Packers' buildings supervisor, did what he usually does in similar situations. He put out the word in the mill town of 96,466 that he needed 200 shovelers to dig out the field at $6 an hour. Dozens had to be turned away, while still others offered to work for free. "I don't want the money," a 50-year-old Packer fan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "I just want to help."

A few days later, a posse of media descended upon the Dallas Cowboys' training complex in Valley Ranch, Texas, to do a different sort of digging. Less than 48 hours after the Cowboys beat the Minnesota Vikings 40-15 in their wild-card playoff game, Dallas police announced they were investigating a claim by a 23-year-old waitress that wide receiver Michael Irvin held a gun to her head as she was sexually assaulted by offensive tackle Erik Williams and another man, unidentified, in Williams' home after the Viking game. Bad news is nothing new to the Cowboys, who have already endured the drug suspensions of Irvin, defensive end Shante Carver and defensive tackle Leon Lett last year, or to the players in question. Irvin, arrested for drug possession last spring while in a motel room with an ex-teammate and two "self-employed models," is currently in the first year of a four-year probation sentence; Williams, who was once accused of sexual assault by a teenage dancer (the case was settled out of court), is only now off probation for the drunken-driving offense that caused the knee injury that kept him out of the latter half of the '94 season. Irvin and Williams are either easy targets or--easy--the biggest fools in the land. Irvin, maintaining his innocence, told the media after Wednesday's practice, "I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys go rewrite, reprint, rerun all these things about what happened Sunday night when you find out that I wasn't even at Erik's house...Can you run it with the same intensity that you ran this other stuff? I want to see if it's possible."

Such is life with the franchise billed as "America's Team." On the other hand, far to the north, life is so sweet for the Packers that many are coming to view them as America's real team. Owned by snow-shoveling townspeople rather than a manure-shoveling megalomaniac like Jerry Jones, dedicated to reviving the glorious tradition of Lambeau and Hutson and Lombardi and Hornung, led by a truly charismatic defensive end (Reggie White) and a throwback quarterback (Brett Favre) who has learned to confine his swashbuckling to the field, the Packers are ready to do the Lambeau Leap into the nation's heart. Their 35-14 victory over the San Francisco 49ers on Saturday on the "frozen tundra" of Lambeau Field put them on a collision course to meet their natural rivals, America's Most Wanted, in the N.F.C. Championship Game next Sunday. (The defending Super Bowl champion Cowboys played the arriviste Carolina Panthers Sunday as TIME went to press.)