The texts started arriving within seconds of the Denver Broncos’ divisional playoff victory over the Buffalo Bills on Saturday.
“I can’t imagine the pain you’re feeling,” one friend wrote, adding five heart emojis. Another wrote, “To suffer another loss like that is cruel, unreal.”
They’ve been coming for days now. All useless in alleviating the grief of a Buffalo fan base once again forced to absorb another stomach-churning defeat in what has become one of the more notorious curses in N.F.L. history.
Thirty-two years ago, my father and I retreated to a Waffle House near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta after the Bills lost their fourth straight Super Bowl. We had traveled to Tampa, Minneapolis and Pasadena the three previous winters, chasing our first Lombardi Trophy. Each time, in increasingly painful fashion, we lost.
In the lead-up to Atlanta, one national newspaper called the Bills “the N.F.L.’s biggest winners and the Super Bowl’s biggest losers,” adding “they are about as welcome in Atlanta as was General Sherman.” True to form, despite leading in the third quarter, the Bills lost again, becoming the only team in N.F.L. history to lose four consecutive Super Bowls.
Sitting in a booth under unforgiving fluorescent lights, the reality fast sunk in. For 10 minutes we barely spoke. Then I asked what I already knew was on my father’s mind.
“Do you think you’ll see the Bills win a Super Bowl in your lifetime?”
My dad was 63, the same age I am today.
“Not in my time,” he said quietly. Then, after a pause, “I just hope you get to see one.”
So far, he’s been wrong about me. And right about himself.
My dad died 22 years later without seeing a championship. After Atlanta, the Bills never went to another Super Bowl, and for 18 of those 22 years, they didn’t even make the playoffs. But when he said those words in 1994, it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t get to the promised land.
Now I’m not so sure.
This past week, for the sixth time in six years, the Bills advanced to within one or two wins of the Super Bowl. And for the sixth time, we were denied. The team became the first in N.F.L. history to win a playoff game in six consecutive years without reaching a Super Bowl.
The heartbreaking playoff losses are so ingrained in Bills lore that we’ve developed our own shorthand: Wide Right, Wide Right II, Music City Miracle, 13 seconds and what could soon be labeled (after last week) the Mile High Meltdown.
In each, if there was even a one-tenth of one percent chance that something could go wrong, it did. Game over. Season over. Rinse and repeat.
And all of it happening while the Bills have the best quarterback on the planet.
Josh Allen is Superman. A league M.V.P. in 2024. The kind of player franchises wait generations for. But he’s 29 now. The window is closing fast. Every year without a ticker tape parade down stately Delaware Avenue is one year closer to its slamming shut.
What terrifies me even deeper is this: Football is how Buffalo expresses itself. And if it expresses itself as a tragic loser, what does it say about us?
When President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist’s bullet in Buffalo in 1901, the city was at its apex: the eighth largest city in the country, America’s leading grain port and confident enough to host the Pan-American Exposition, a showpiece of American ingenuity at the dawn of the 20th century.
When the St. Lawrence Seaway opened about half a century later, it sent ships past Buffalo and the city into decline. What followed were decades of population loss, economic stagnation, epic winter storms and the elimination of tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs as huge plants like Bethlehem Steel closed. Even the city’s beloved pro basketball team, the Buffalo Braves, packed its vans in the dead of night for a warmer climate. Buffalo became a punchline, a symbol of urban decay. A city of losers.
I left Buffalo in the early 1980s convinced it was no longer a place to realize the American dream. Many of my friends did too.
But even as we left, we kept an abiding love for the city and what it stood for, for us: family, grit, resilience, generosity. A city that judges people not by the jobs they hold, the distinctions they’ve won or the money they’ve earned, but by the families they’ve raised and how they treat their neighbors. Woe to the big-city slicker who dares return with an air of haughtiness; you’ll be quickly, and shamefully, brought back to earth.
The image of the Bills as perennial bridesmaids has long reinforced the idea of Buffalo as a down-on-its-luck city, even as it enjoys the early stirrings of an economic renaissance. Cranes now dot the long-dormant Buffalo skyline. And for the first time in decades, the city’s population is actually growing.
But we still wait for a Super Bowl victory, hoping that will make things right. “There’s always next year” has been the city’s mantra for decades.
This September, fans may finally have real reason to believe. For the first time in over 50 years, the Bills will play in a brand-new, state-of-the-art $2 billion stadium. Real shelter from lake-effect winters. Luxury boxes that finally feel luxurious.
And now a new head coach, with a new mind set, new plays and new personnel.
Now, after another devastating postseason loss, Buffalo’s airwaves are buzzing again with optimism that next year, finally, will be the year to win the Super Bowl.
My father never got to feel that joy.
I still hope I will.
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