Evie was nearly five years old when she first saw a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader, and it was all over. Love at first sight. Not puppy love, not crush love — we’re talking the kind of devotion normally reserved for saints and cult leaders.

It happened in the basement. The Har­lows had a coal stove down there, surrounded not by drywall but by the faint smell of soot and regret. Alongside it sat her father’s pride and joy: an old black-and-white TV. “Old” might be unfair — it was 1981, so maybe the thing was brand new — but in Evie’s memory it was practically a time machine. Dials, antennas, maybe four working channels. And her father, naturally, had it tuned to sports.

Her dad was a basketball guy, which was funny because he was five-foot-six and built like he’d been cast as “scrappy mailman” in a sitcom pilot. But he loved the game. Evie did not. The squeak of sneakers on wood, the endless whistles, the droning commentators — it all set her teeth on edge. Years later, she’d try to make peace with basketball again, only to lose twenty bucks when Chris Webber called a time-out he didn’t have. That sealed it. Basketball was out. Gambling too.

But football — football had cheerleaders.

On that fateful afternoon, the Cowboys were playing. Which meant the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders were dancing across that tiny coal-dusted screen, somehow glowing even without color. Evie froze. Boots. Hair. Sparkle. Precision. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her five years of hard living.

“Who are they?” she asked, breathless.

Her father barely looked up. “Cheerleaders. They don’t matter.”

“They do. Who are they?”

“Women. From Dallas.”

“Where’s Dallas?”

“Texas.”

“Where’s Texas?”

“Don’t you want to go upstairs?”

“No. I want to see the cheerleaders. Can we just watch them?”

Her father laughed — rare, and not in a warm way. “No. You will never be a cheerleader. Go. Up. Stairs.”

But it was too late. Evie was hooked. She had found the true, unrequited love of her life.

Even with everything that came later, she never stopped believing her entire life would have been different — better, brighter, bouncier — if she’d been allowed to cheer.

Her father had other plans. “No daughter of mine will cheer when she can play the sport instead.” Which sounded empowering in theory, but the truth was simple: Evie couldn’t play the sport. Not for lack of trying.

She was afflicted with what medical professionals might call catastrophic klutziness. She could walk into a wall while aiming for a doorway. She could fall over while standing still. She once reached under a cabinet and accidentally punched the cabinet itself, as if it had been caught cheating. She’d discover bruises in the shower and then slip and add a new one trying to investigate.

So yes, cheerleading would have been dangerous. Flyers get dropped, bases collapse, pompoms fly. But Evie had her secret talents. She could ice skate like she’d been born on blades. She could limbo on roller skates like gravity had signed a waiver. She could fling her tiny body across a gymnastics vault like it owed her money. Just don’t ask her to dribble. There was a greater chance of her solving the Riemann hypothesis.

Unfortunately, her father had a rigid hierarchy of sports worth his time. Gymnastics didn’t count. Ice skating didn’t count. And cheerleading was at the very bottom, somewhere below “things that should be banned in polite society.” She begged, she pleaded, all the way through high school. The answer never changed.

The cruel irony? Evie would’ve made a phenomenal cheerleader. She had no fear, no sense of self-preservation, and she lived life at an energy level of eleven when everyone else was at six. She was cute as hell and knew it. The self-confidence alone would’ve saved her a decade of bad choices.

But she never got the chance.

So, in the only form of rebellion available to a small child with no car keys, she became a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Lucky for her, the Cowboys didn’t suck in the 90s. Quite the opposite. They were America’s Team, back when Jerry Jones still remembered he was supposed to stay in the owner’s box and not play fantasy football with real people’s careers. Evie thrived. She was boisterous, not obnoxious — which, in Eagles country, was a miracle.

College made it even better. Boys discovered she loved football, and not in the “I like Tom Brady’s jawline” way. She knew football. She understood formations, penalties, strategy. They didn’t know what to do with themselves. One poor soul nearly proposed on the spot when she quoted Wildcats.

Her first love, naturally, was Emmitt Smith. She had the jersey. She knew his ankles better than her multiplication tables. She also adored his interviews — not just for content, but because he spoke in full sentences with properly conjugated verbs. Grammar nerds take their thrills where they can.

Years later, a college friend who worked at ESPN claimed he told Emmitt about “that one girl in the dorm who drove everyone nuts with her Cowboys obsession.” Supposedly, Emmitt smiled and said, “Tell Evelyn Harlow I said thank you.” Was it true? Who knows. Doesn’t matter. To Evie, it was fact. Greatest moment of her life. Well, second greatest. First was Ryan Reynolds once liking her tweet. Third was birthing her children. (Sorry, kids. Celebrity validation wins.)

She raised those children as Cowboys fans, of course. Tried to sign her daughter up for cheer once, too. The kid spent the season picking dandelions on the sidelines, proving genetics is a cruel mistress.

Evie herself never stopped yearning. She quoted Bring It On like scripture. She considered naming her daughter Torrance. She watched Cheer on Netflix and followed every Navarro Bulldog on Instagram. If life had mulligans, this was hers.

She loved football, yes. But what she wanted was to be Annabelle from The Replacements — short shorts, pompoms, and a front-row seat to Keanu Reeves.

Instead, she got Jerry Jones pretending to be a GM, and Joe Buck sucking the joy out of every Aikman call like it was his side hustle.

She was meant to cheer. She knew it with her whole klutzy, bruised, grammar-loving heart. But instead, she learned how to scream for the Cowboys from the cheap seats.

It wasn’t the dream. But it was spirit.