The Eagles and Cowboys are talking trash and telling truths. And the truth is, one team is cooler than the other.

One of the coolest things about sports is that it is the rare institution in our society in which tribalism is a healthy force. Nowadays, so much of the public discourse and so many of our social interactions are framed in us-vs.-them terms, with zero-sum stakes. You see it and feel it in our politics, at school-board meetings, in Facebook and Twitter threads, at our Sunday dinner tables. What do you think? How do you identify? Whose side are you on? Tension and tempers rise and lines are drawn because we believe the topics and outcomes matter so much.

Sports is different. Your allegiances to your team cut across all those divisive opinions and demographic categories, render them less relevant and reduce them to their proper proportions in our lives, turn hate into the best kind of bonding agent. Who cares who you voted for? Are you wearing red this weekend to support the Phillies? … All right, enough complaining about cable news. It’s time to turn the game on and complain about the Knicks. … You’re Black. I’m white. We root for Michigan. We can’t stand Ohio State. Let’s have a beer. Go Blue.

There’s a great scene in the film Major League in which an average-joe Cleveland Indians fan and a spiky-hair heavy-metal dude, strangers standing at a bar, celebrate a miraculous victory by hugging each other. They stop. They look at one another, puzzled and uncertain. Then they resume hugging. That’s what I mean. That’s cool.

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All of this is to say, of course, that the Dallas Cowboys are one of the uncoolest things in sports.

Ahead of Sunday night’s big game at Lincoln Financial Field — the 4-1 Cowboys against the 5-0 Eagles — there has been some chirping out of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area, some of it good-natured, some of it less so.

When former Eagles tackle Jason Peters called the team’s fans “[expletive] idiots,” for instance, he wasn’t being malicious or insulting; he was praising them for their passion. But when defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence said of Jalen Hurts, “All you all need to write is he hasn’t played the Cowboys yet, so we don’t know how good is he,” he was engaging in the kind of chest-puffing and edgy trash-talking that makes a rivalry game like this one fun.

Usually, though, these games are more fun, and mean more, to one side of this rivalry. It’s a cliche in these parts that the Eagles could win two games all season, and if those two victories came against Dallas, their fans would still be happy. But it’s a cliche because it’s true, and it reflects the key difference between the identities of these franchises and their fan bases, a difference that Eagles center Jason Kelce explained well in an interview Thursday on WIP-FM (94.1).

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“What I realized the more I’ve come to be a Philadelphian and the more I’ve played here and played the Cowboys is that it really is just such a dichotomy,” Kelce said. “They’re like two polar opposites that have been in the same division and played so many meaningful games of football together.

“You have the Philadelphia fan base, which is this extremely localized, die-hard fan base that is authentic to all of them growing up together in this community, in this environment that breeds authenticity. And you have the Cowboys fan base. They have that [environment] in Dallas, but the majority of that fan base is built on commercialism and all of this pop-culture, Lakers-Yankees-type fandom that, I think, is the complete opposite of what the Philadelphia Eagles’ fan base stands for. Then you have the North and the South going into it. You have so many factors and different things that it’s almost led to it being a game of cultures and values that I certainly feel and love to represent.”

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Take geography out of the discussion. That’s a factor, sure, but there’s a bigger one: the teams’ histories, each one’s status in the NFL over time. The Cowboys were great from the mid-1960s through the 1970s — just as pro football was overtaking baseball as the true national pastime — then had a mini-dynasty in the early 1990s. They were Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman and gorgeous cheerleaders and gleaming Texas Stadium. They were fixtures on NFL Films and Monday Night Football. As Kelce noted, they had and still have fans in every region of the country.

The Eagles, aside from a brief period under Dick Vermeil, were small-time. They had a grimy home field in Veterans Stadium. They were often inept. They couldn’t compare.

“Everybody resented the fact that the Cowboys became ‘America’s Team,’” Merrill Reese, the Eagles’ radio play-by-play voice since 1977, once said in a phone interview. “They were the glamour franchise, and for years and years and years, they battered this team characteristically and constantly. They just did it over and over again. They beat them so many times, and they beat them so badly.”

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Those images of the two teams remain relatively unchanged, even though, over the last 25-30 years, the Eagles have been closer to a premier franchise, at least on the field, than the Cowboys have. Dallas last reached, and won, a Super Bowl in January 1996. Since then, the Cowboys have had 13 winning seasons and made the playoffs 11 times. Over that same period, the Eagles have had 16 winning seasons, made the playoffs 15 times, and won a Super Bowl.

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No matter. Dallas is still the most powerful prime-time draw in the league. Dallas has the drama and the owner, Jerry Jones, who loves to stoke it. Dallas has the stadium that looks like it belongs in a Steven Spielberg sci-fi blockbuster. Dallas is soulless, superficial glitz. Dallas isn’t fandom by local tradition or birthright. Dallas is fandom by trendiness and accessibility, the empty-calorie popularity of a boy band or a Marvel movie. Dallas is everything that the Philadelphia region — provincial, parochial, loyal, repelled by haughtiness and snobbery — despises.

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“It’s always been my feeling, based on what I’ve seen, that your readers have a pretty deep-seated hatred of everything that’s about Dallas, and they always will,” Brad Sham, the Cowboys’ radio play-by-play voice since 1984, once said in a phone interview. “Here, they don’t care very much about any of that, and I don’t think they ever have. They just care about winning and looking good. You don’t even want to win ugly. You’ve got to win and look good.”

What Sham was saying, really, is that the Dallas Cowboys and their fans want to be cool. But in sports, cool isn’t cool. The Cowboys are America’s Team. Big deal. The Eagles are Philadelphia’s Team. That’s sports at its best and its coolest. And around here, that means everything.

Inquirer Eagles beat reporters EJ Smith and Josh Tolentino preview the team’s Week 6 game against the Dallas Cowboys. Watch at Inquirer.com/EaglesGameday