DALLAS — Stepping up.

Bearing down. Making plays. Representing.

Go ahead and pick your favorite cliché, the one that explains how some team or, really, how some guys on the team did all the things they had to do to come out on top, because that’s how Oklahoma did it Saturday afternoon at the Cotton Bowl.

The macro picture was clear.

Lose and forget about the Big 12.

Lose and you’re 0-2 in the conference and 0-3 against Texas the last three seasons. Lose and you’re in freefall, wondering when it ends.

Only this wasn’t a macro game. Maybe it never is, but it sure wasn’t Saturday. This was a micro game or, if there’s a word smaller than micro that means the same thing, it was that.

Because OU’s 28-21 victory wasn’t so much about the defense as it was Curtis Lofton, two weeks after making 14 tackles at Tulsa and one after making 16 in Boulder, stripping the ball from Jamaal Charles so Gerald McCoy could fall on it with a play that wasn’t sort of like scoring a touchdown, but exactly like it, because, coming inside the 5, it kept one off the board.

“I thought (that) was probably the play of the game,” Bob Stoops said.

For its absolute singularity, it wasn’t so unlike Roy Williams’ leap of faith way back when. Only it won’t be remembered that way because it had competition.

DeMarco Murray put the Sooners on top with a third-quarter bolt of lightning that will be replayed and replayed because Joe Jon Finley had moved a Longhorn out of the way but not himself, which only gave Murray an opportunity to break into the open through the air, like Bill Johnson coming around a turn in Sarajevo.

It didn’t end there for Murray. With Allen Patrick ailing, the Las Vegas redshirt freshman was the man getting all the hard inside yards, too. Just don’t forget the bolt because, at the time, it was everything.

Or Sam Bradford, playing in the spotlight of the Texas State Fair for the very first time. He might not have been Colt McCoy’s superior only because McCoy maybe played the best game of his life, yet facing a tie game and 94 yards to victory, Bradford took out his scalpel and carved Texas up.

It wasn’t his 21 of 32 passing with no picks and three scores for 244 yards that put the Sooners over the top, but that drive, when he completed 7 of 8 for 83 yards, the incompletion a Quentin Chaney drop and the touchdown, a 35-yarder to Malcolm Kelly, requiring his standing in the pocket just to be clobbered.

The game took almost 31?2 hours. The drive, in real time, took 7 or 8 minutes, and Bradford owned them when he had to own them.