Dallas ? When Wanda Plumlee’s husband starts planning for New Year’s Eve and wedding anniversaries, he doesn’t have to worry about making reservations for a fancy dinner.

Plumlee and her husband, Charles, celebrate those special occasions by going to watch Dallas play — that’s the Stars, not the Cowboys.

“We follow the Stars. That is the only team our whole family will sit down and watch together,” said Wanda Plumlee, who has been married for almost 20 years with three sons.

The Cowboys, who still bill themselves as “America’s Team,” used to be the biggest event in town. But the five-time Super Bowl champions are no longer the only team Dallas sports fans love.

Only about 10 miles from Texas Stadium, the NHL’s Stars and the NBA’s Mavericks are regularly winning and selling out the $420 million American Airlines Center they moved into last year. Both are among the top teams in their leagues while the Cowboys are playing out their fourth straight non-winning season.

Since the Cowboys last made the playoffs, the Stars have won the Stanley Cup and returned to the finals. The Mavericks have made a triumphant return to the postseason after an abysmal decade and started this season with 14 straight wins, one shy of the NBA record.

“I’m a native Texan, and I go shopping when the Cowboys play on Sunday,” said Plumlee, who has a room in her Fort Worth home filled with Stars paraphernalia.

That’s quite a change from the sports culture Stars president Jim Lites encountered when the team moved from Minnesota in 1993. That was the summer between back-to-back Super Bowl championships for the Cowboys and hockey in the South was still a new concept.

Dallas defenseman Stephane Robidas (17) is knocked into the boards by Los Angeles Kings center Eric Belanger during Wednesday's game in Dallas. The Stars are rapidly gaining fans in Dallas.

“They were the best, we were new and the Mavs were at the bottom,” Lites said. “The Cowboys were just killing everybody. We’d do everything we could to coax any Cowboys player to games so we could put them on the Jumbotron. They were the celebrities.”

Nowadays, the other teams are doing just fine on their own merits.

“We don’t pay any attention to football at all,” said Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who bought the downtrodden team after making more than $1 billion selling his dot-com start-up to Yahoo! and has overseen the Mavs’ revitalization. “We sell fun at the AAC, and hope that we and the Cowboys sell out all of our games.”

Other than record-setting running back Emmitt Smith, the Cowboys have few marketable players. Instead, it’s hockey and basketball stars who are growing in prominence.

Stars center Mike Modano — a standout player with coverboy looks — is one of the town’s most eligible bachelors. The heartthrob’s poster is on the walls of many teenage girls, like former Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman’s was in the 1990s.

Jerseys of the Mavericks “Big Three” — All-Stars players Michael Finley, Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki — are popular attire for fans, like the blue and silver ones bearing the numbers of Aikman, Smith and Michael Irvin were when they led the Cowboys to three Super Bowls in the ’90s.

Texans will always love football, but in Dallas, nothing sells like a winner.

The Stars have sold out 204 straight games, the third-longest streak in the NHL. The Mavs go for their 11th straight home win to start the season and 39th straight sellout Saturday night.

The Cowboys have been bigger winners at the box office than on their field. Despite recent struggles, they’ve stretched their sellout streak to 103 straight, dating to the start of the 1991 season.

“That’s a tribute to what was built here starting in 1960 and all of the way through,” Cowboys coach Dave Campo said. “Tradition fuels this town. This town is fueled by football, and it’s a football state.”

But it hasn’t been easy.

They’ve heavily promoted Smith’s pursuit of the NFL career rushing record, which he reached in October, and they’ve had to use promotions such as four tickets, four hot dogs and four sodas for $99. Even when games are announced as sellouts, plenty of tickets are going unused.

The Cowboys are still a valuable asset for owner Jerry Jones.

Forbes lists the Cowboys’ value at $784 million, second only to the Washington Redskins in the NFL. That dwarfs the magazine’s listed value of the Stars ($254 million, third-best in the NHL) and the Mavericks ($211 million).

The Stars are being sold by Tom Hicks, who also owns the Texas Rangers.