The Cowboys had the ball at the goal line, a timeout in the bank, and a chance to close out a game the NFL flew to another hemisphere to sell. They went for it. Lamar Jackson got the ball back with enough seconds to make the building very quiet, and the Ravens won it 34-31 in the final seconds, Tyler Loop finishing what Mike McCarthy's fourth-down math started.

Derrick Henry spent the same afternoon rewriting the record book, the 32-year-old workhorse climbing into company the league usually reserves for backs a decade younger. Baltimore didn't need the poetry. They had the yards.

Here's the part nobody in Brazil wanted to say into a microphone: the NFL paid to stage a Cowboys game there because Dallas is the most bankable brand it owns, and the product it delivered was a fourth-down call bad enough to have its own head coach's job security trending by halftime. Cowboys corner Shavon Revel joined the injury list too, which means the most valuable franchise in American sport now has thinner depth and a louder chorus asking why Mike McCarthy is still calling the shots on fourth-and-goal at all.

The league sells Dallas as its flagship precisely because the Cowboys always show up, ratings guaranteed, outcome irrelevant. Sunday proved the outcome is never irrelevant to the building. It never was.