ARLINGTON, Texas – Why aren’t the Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl champions? Perhaps Christina Aguilera summed it best in the national anthem.

“What so proudly we watched …”

How do you flub that line? How do the Steelers commit three turnovers?

There is only one link — Jerry Jones.

Everything he touched turned to frozen cow manure before the game, but who would’ve thought it was only a warmup? Sunday’s big hoedown at Cowboys Stadium turned into the imperfect ending to a thoroughly imperfect week. Unless you were a Packers fan, in which case you just want to get out of town before the Curse of Jerry gets you.

The Steelers will leave Dallas thinking they were robbed. By themselves. “We … we … I’m not going to say we gave one away,” Antwaan Randle El said. “You have to give credit to Green Bay. But we had the game in our hands.”

That was one of the worst places to put anything valuable on Sunday. Steelers hands dropped the ball or threw it to the wrong team. The difference in the game was as simple as the turnover differential.

Pittsburgh 3, Green Bay 0.

Yes, you have to give the Packers credit. Every Steelers player was careful to point that out. Then they went back to banging their heads on the wall over all their semi-self-inflicted wounds. What had gotten into them?

“I don’t know,” James Farrior said.

I don’t either, but the Curse of Jerry seems like as good a reason as any. The Cowboys’ owner was the prime mover and shaker behind everything XLV. In true big-britches fashion, he promised the grandest Super Bowl ever.

Mother Nature, obviously not a fan of hubris, got even by turning Super Bowl week into the Iditarod dog race. We needed a humdinger of a game to salvage the overall proceedings. It was close, but by no means a thing of beauty.

Pittsburgh had a chance to make it truly memorable. Down six, two minutes to go and one stirring drive away from immortality. The Steelers executed about as well as Aguilera.

Seriously, how do you flub the national anthem? Was three months not enough time to memorize the lines? But we shouldn’t blame her. As she was choking, a bunch of fans were singing another tune below the stands. “Jerry Sucks!”

So went the chant of ticket holders who got to the game and were handed a note: “Dear Sir or Madam, due to unforeseen conditions ….”

More than 1,200 seats were not available. In his haste to set a Super Bowl attendance record, Jones hadn’t gotten a final seating OK from the fire marshal. So people who’d traveled far and wide to get here were being relocated to the Miller Lite Club, where they could watch the game on TV.

As everyone pointed out, they could’ve stayed home and done that. The fact the NFL was offering three times the $800 tickets wasn’t buying much understanding. I asked one guy from Pittsburgh where the Dallas Super Bowl rated among the 45 that have been played.

“Forty-seventh,” he said.

It probably fell to 49th by game’s end. At least the 400 fans exiled to the Miller Lite Club didn’t have to sit through the Black Eyed Peas halftime show. “A surprisingly stale medley,” is how the AP reviewed it.

I don’t know. Troy Polamalu‘s guitar cameo on “Sweet Child ‘o Mine” was a nice surprise. But overall, it did seem the Peas were trying too hard. At that point you wondered what else could go wrong.

Maybe the giant video board would start showing reruns of the World Cup. Instead, we got a nice Steelers comeback from an 18-point deficit. They were well on their way to the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history, then Rashard Mendenhall was flattened by Clay Matthews.

Or was it the Curse of Jerry?

Mendenhall carried the ball 324 times this year and had two fumbles. So naturally he laid one on the ground at the worst possible time. The Packers took advantage, but somehow the Steelers still had a chance to win it on the final drive.

“I expected Ben to come through with a winning TD,” Brett Keisel said. The bad part about that would have been all the stories it would have spawned about Roethlisberger’s redemption. As if another Super Bowl ring would prove he’s no longer a hound dog. Instead, he’ll leave town feeling like a dog for throwing two interceptions.

“You can overcome penalties,” Mike Tomlin said. “But you can’t overcome turnovers.”

Or a botched national anthem or a ticket fiasco or a week of Siberian weather. Mr. Curse was asked if Dallas will ever host another Super Bowl.

“It’s a secret ballot,” Jones said. “We’d like to.”

That makes one of him.