As Tony Romo lay in pain on the turf at Lincoln Financial Field late Sunday afternoon, it was fairly easy to see the Dallas Cowboys’ 2015 season lying there with him.

Romo has long been one of Dallas’ most pivotal players. Over the first several seasons of his career he was known to do some great things, only to undo all the good he had done with a bonehead play or several that led to the team’s demise, both in individual games and in seasons at large. It was a tragic combination that led Romo to earn a reputation as a player who could not perform in the clutch.

But over the last few years, Romo has matured as a player, and the inconsistencies that once plagued his game have all but vanished, giving way to the type of stability that the Cowboys have craved at the quarterback position since Troy Aikman’s prime. Romo has truly been invaluable to Dallas in recent years.

However, despite that progress, and the fact that he posted the best season of his career in 2014, the “choker” label has lingered into 2015. When he took the ball with under a minute-and-a-half to go and Dallas down six on Sunday Night Football in Week 1, millions of football fans still expected Romo to fail one way or another.

They were shocked when — in front of a national audience — he did just the opposite, leading Dallas on an epic game-winning drive.

The thing is, no one should have been surprised by what Romo did in Week 1. The six-play, 72-yard drive that he led, without the benefit of timeouts and without spiking the ball once, was a thing of beauty, and that’s what Romo does now. He gained a reputation as a choke artist because of failures in similar spots, but nobody gets it done 100 percent of the time.

In fact, no player in the NFL gets it done more than Romo. That fourth quarter comeback drive to lock up a win in Dallas’ 2015 season opener marked Romo’s 24th such comeback since he became the Dallas starter midway through the 2006 season, the most in the NFL over that span. Romo has also been remarkably durable over that time. Though we’ve heard about various ailments, particularly with his back, he’s missed just two games since 2010.

That’s why what happened on Sunday in Philadelphia is so unfortunate. Romo appeared to just be hitting his stride with a Dallas team that had put so many pieces in place to chase a championship. Then Romo was driven into the turf by Eagles linebacker Jordan Hicks on Sunday and left the second game of the 2015 season with a broken left clavicle that put his and the Cowboys’ season in jeopardy.

It’s the same injury that Romo suffered in 2010 on a hit by New York Giants linebacker Michael Boley. But that’s a lifetime ago in Romo years. The Cowboys fell to 1-5 after the game and went on to go 1-7, falling out of postseason contention early and making the decision to shut Romo down an easy one.

The circumstances this year are much different. The injury happened four weeks earlier and Dallas, at least at this point, remains very much in contention. That’s gives the Cowboys a glimmer of hope that this season can still have a positive ending even after Romo and Dez Bryant went down in back-to-back weeks to begin the season.

With two wins in the bank, all Dallas has to do is tread water while Romo and Bryant heal. For Romo, that’s guaranteed to be at least eight weeks (seven games), after he was placed on short term IR this week. Dallas has some tough but mostly winnable matchups, and their bye, over that stretch. If they can post a 3-4 record or even a 4-3 mark, they’d be looking at 5-4 or 6-3 going into late November and December, about where they’d need to be in the lowly NFC East.

Should Romo heal properly within that eight week timetable, and perhaps more importantly if Dallas is able to stay alive without him over the next two months, his return would be positioned perfectly to change his reputation for good.

THE WORM HAS TURNED

In past seasons, we might be led to believe that December is the worst time for Romo to come back. Part of the “Romo isn’t clutch” narrative states that he is at his worst in December and January, when the going gets tough.

But recent history also runs in direct counter to that premise.

Last year, Romo returned in Week 10 after missing one game due to a fractured transverse process in his back and led the Cowboys to a 6-1 record down the stretch that got them into the postseason. It was by far the best late season performance of his career, devoid of the type of big-game mistakes with which he has been so often associated.

So why are we still waiting for the other shoe to drop? What else does Romo have to do to shake the label that comes with the gaffes he committed early in his career?

Win in the postseason, you say? Well, he did do a little of that last year too, picking up his first playoff win since 2009 in the Wild Card round against Detroit. That too was accomplished by mounting a fourth quarter comeback and leading his team on a game-winning drive. Dallas was down three points with just over eight minutes to go when Romo guided them on an 11-play drive that soaked up nearly six minutes and culminated in a touchdown pass to put the Cowboys ahead. They held on to win and advance.

He nearly did it again in the next round at Green Bay, leading Dallas down the field in the closing minutes of a tight battle with the Packers. When he heaved a great pass deep down the sideline on 4th down, for a juggling catch by Dez Bryant near the goal line, it seemed Romo might finally be able to put the clutch narrative to bed. But upon review, the NFL’s application of its far too convoluted catch rules got in the way of that story, and instead of being a few minutes and a few stops on the defensive from moving on to the NFC Championship Game, the Cowboys were sent home.

That call robbed Romo of what surely would have been a classic game against the vaunted secondary of the Seahawks in Seattle, where he’d already led the Cowboys to victory once last season. It would’ve been Romo’s best chance to change public perception for good, and what a perfect place to do it that would have been. After all, Seattle is where this whole narrative of Romo as “choker” was born back in January of 2007.

DUBIOUS HISTORY

After spending two and a half seasons as a reserve following his signing as an undrafted free agent in 2004, Romo took over as the Dallas starter midway through the 2006 season. He went 6-4 as a starter in 10 games, and led the Cowboys to the postseason for the first time in three years and just the second time since 1999.

Then in the Wild Card round, Romo put Dallas in position to defeat the Seahawks in Seattle and advance. Late in a back-and-forth game, he led the Cowboys on what looked like a game-winning drive all the way down to the Seahawks 8-yard-line. Dallas setup for a chip shot field goal from there with just over two minutes remaining in the game. But while most starting quarterbacks would head for the sideline in that situation, Romo remained on the field as the placeholder, a job he held as Drew Bledsoe’s backup at quarterback to start the season and that Bill Parcells inexplicably kept him in even after he became the starter.

The rest is history. Romo bobbled the snap, botching the field goal try. What people don’t talk about as much is that Romo had the wherewithal to get up and run with the ball and nearly scored a touchdown on the play. But he was caught by Jordan Babineaux, who tripped him up at the two, just six feet from the quickest hero-to-goat-to-hero story in NFL history.

It’s hard not to wonder what would have happened had Romo scored that touchdown. That Cowboys team wasn’t built for a Super Bowl run, but crazier things have happened. Regardless of the outcome of that playoff run, Romo’s would-be hero moment may have created a different narrative for him in the years to come.

Dallas went 13-3 the next year and was a team with championship aspirations, but memorably bowed out of the playoffs in the divisional round to the Giants, complete with a Romo interception to end it. But that game was inarguably lost by the Cowboys defense. After Romo led two second quarter touchdown drives to give the team the lead, the Dallas defense allowed Eli Manning to respond with a 46-second touchdown drive at the end of the first half to tie the game. The momentum swing carried through the rest of the contest.

Romo has made a lengthy list of boneheaded plays in the years that followed, many of them in clutch spots and most of them inexplicably in front of a national audience in late season prime time games. This is not to excuse Romo for every mistake he has made. He is very much responsible for his overall record in elimination games being so poor.

But it’s been quite a while since that version of Romo has been spotted.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS

Prior to the postseason last year, the last time Dallas played in an elimination game was the 2013 regular season finale, a game Romo wasn’t able to play in due to injury. You have to go all the way back to 2012 for his last truly backbreaking mistake in the clutch. That would be his infamous “fadeaway” interception in the NFC East winner-take-all regular season finale against Washington. His third pick of the game, with three minutes go and the Cowboys down three points, sealed Dallas’ fate that game and that season.

Since then, Romo has been mostly excellent. After throwing a league-high 19 interceptions in 2012, he threw that many during the 2013 and 2014 seasons combined. During those two seasons he led nine game-winning drives and six fourth quarter comebacks, including big wins at the Giants the last two Novembers, that huge win at Seattle last year, and the playoff win over Detroit last January. Then there was Week 1 this year, when he overcame the letdowns of his wide receivers throughout the game and calmly led the game-winning drive.

It’s no coincidence that the game has changed for Romo since the Cowboys began to prioritize protecting him with an offensive line and balancing their offense by running the football.

For a while there, Romo was “protected” by the likes of Andre Gurode, Montrae Holland, Phil Costa, Nate Livings, Ryan Cook and Mark Colombo. Now he has three first round picks on his offensive line in Tyron Smith, Travis Frederick and Zack Martin, All Pro players who are arguably the best left tackle, center and guard in the league. That trio plus the steady Ronald Leary at left guard and Doug Free at right tackle, give Romo time to process a defense and make smarter decisions, and the results have been undeniable.

That wall of protection let him down on Sunday, leading to this most recent injury, but Romo hasn’t shown a propensity to make a setback like that change his game. He’s been dealing with back issues for the last several seasons and still keeps coming back and making great plays. He also simply doesn’t make the same gaffes he once did. Sure, he’s still going to make mistakes. All quarterbacks do from time to time. You’d be hard-pressed to find one who hasn’t cost his team a game or two over the past several years. That’s going to happen.

But it’s time to stop expecting it to happen from Romo every time he drops back to pass. When he does make a mistake and fails to lead another game-winning drive, that’s when we should be surprised. When he comes through in the clutch, as he did in Week 1, he should simply be lauded like we would Tom Brady, Peyton and Eli Manning, Drew Brees or Aaron Rodgers. That’s the type of clutch company Romo keeps now.

Pretty incredible for a guy that went undrafted out of Eastern Illinois in 2004.

Not for nothing, but that should be the story as it relates to Romo. He came from nowhere to make an excellent career for himself in the National Football League, is already among the best undrafted quarterbacks ever, and could go down among the best undrafted players ever.

Isn’t that basically the American Dream?

Instead of being picked apart for what he hasn’t done, in part because he wears a Dallas Cowboys star on his helmet, Romo should be praised for what he has accomplished.

He does have a laundry list of mistakes he’s made in his career, but we’re pretty far removed now from the most recent of those. There’s no need to forget those things. But it’s time to forgive Tony Romo for them, because for the last two-plus years the guy has been, hands down, one of the best quarterbacks in the league. And there’s no doubting the NFL is worse off without him playing the game for at least the next eight weeks.

But if Romo is able to come back this year and help the Cowboys salvage a season that appeared to be at an early end last Sunday afternoon when he went down in Philadelphia, don’t be surprised. That’s who Tony Romo is now. We should all get used to it.