As the specter of a year without pro football looms, the National Football League Players Association is taking its case to the halls of Congress — mounting an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign urging lawmakers to push the owners to strike a deal before the March 3 deadline.

It’s not an easy sell. Realizing that there’s little sympathy for multimillion-dollar athletes clashing with billionaire owners over the size of their paydays, the players set about writing a narrative that casts them more as the scrappy kid in “Rudy” than the mercenaries of “Any Given Sunday.”