January can’t get here fast enough for the Dallas Cowboys.

It all starts this afternoon in Oxnard, Calif., when Jerry Jones gives his annual camp kickoff state-of-the-Cowboys pep talk with trusty sidekick Wade Phillips waving his pompoms alongside.

And don’t think the Hard Knocks cameras won’t be recording every mushy moment of it.

There’s six weeks of Camp Cupcake II — or Camp Marshmallow, as Phillips renamed it over the weekend — spliced around four exhibition games. That’ll be followed by 17 weeks of further preliminaries to finally get to the only thing that matters around here: the playoffs.

Win a playoff game and Phillips probably keeps his job. Get booted out again in the first round and he’d best have his résumé up to date with stamps on the envelopes.

And, sorry, Wade, byes just don’t count. A bye won’t sell a single ticket to Jerry World in 2009.

There are many questions facing the Cowboys as camp begins, some more critical than others, but none looms over this franchise with as much potentially grim import as the fact that neither the head coach nor the quarterback has ever won a playoff game.

That 0-fer streak must end this season before it becomes such a psychological burden that it suffocates everything Jones has tried so hard to build.

Like the Mavericks after their ignominious bouncing by eighth seed Golden State in the first round of the 2007 playoffs, the regular season this year is nothing but a warm-up act for the main event.

There are plenty of reasons to believe Phillips’ and Tony Romo’s personal losing streaks, as well as the team’s 11-year drought, will end this January, provided the Cowboys find positive answers to most of the other questions that linger.

Can the Cowboys’ thin and aging receiving corps stay healthy and get the job done?

Will Marion Barber be as effective as the No. 1 running back as he was as the No. 2, and can rookie Felix Jones be the change-of-pace backup that the Cowboys believe he will?

Will second-round draft pick Mike Jenkins and Adam Jones — assuming commissioner Roger Goodell lets him play at some point — give the Cowboys the depth they’ll almost surely need at cornerback?

Can they finally find a place to hide Roy Williams?

Most importantly, who — besides Jerry, of course — will emerge as this summer’s star of HBO’s salty Hard Knocks?

And does anybody else chuckle at the irony of a show called Hard Knocks featuring a training camp dubbed Camp Cupcake II?

So far, the hardest knock we’ve seen at a Phillips-run camp is the head coach patting himself on the back.

Ah, but let’s save the zingers for later. It’s late July and, at the moment, hope springs eternal.

Maybe this is the year Wade actually wins a playoff game. He can do it (I think). He has the smarts. He knows the game. What he’s never been able to prove is that he knows what buttons his players need pushed or when they need pushing.

Can a leopard change his spots? Does a dead man always wear plaid? Can an old dog learn a new trick?