Gutted. Exhausted. Frustrated. A few words won’t begin to describe another heartbreaking playoff loss by the Buffalo Bills, this time to the Denver Broncos, 33-30 in overtime. The Bills turned the ball over five times on Saturday at Empower Field at Mile High and were also brutalized by a couple of questionable calls by the refs. The defense was down to playing the last safety/DBs on the roster.
It was a slobber-knocker of a game that apparently also end with Denver’s QB Bo Nix breaking his ankle and out for the rest of the playoffs. You can’t make this stuff up.
I’ve also been reading commentary by some rather passive-aggressive pundits who thrive on our misery about how sorry they feel for fans of the Buffalo Bills. Our team can’t win the big one. We are a testimony to sports misery. The Bills will never win a Super Bowl.
Blah. Blah. Blah.
At this point, many Buffalo sports fans like myself have already made peace with perpetual heartbreak.
We’ve heard all the cliches, the whining about refs and the excuses. None of that moves the needle for some of us anymore. And that’s OK. Because of all the permutations of variables that go into winning or losing, maybe the best outcome of losing is the resiliency it can produce.
We’ve spent decades being buoyed by the possibility that one day our time will come. We will have that celebration down Delaware Avenue because if we just wish on it hard enough, it will happen because we deserve it to happen. And the longer there is a lack of a championship in Buffalo the more we deserve it?
That’s not how this thing called life works.
Nothing is guaranteed and the older you get the more you realize this truth.
Bad things happen. Dreams remain unfulfilled.
How we handle adversity as a sports fan is our choice. If we live life with a sense of entitlement (expectation of future outcome), we rob ourselves of the spontaneous combustion that happens when we live in the moment. Feeling pain and frustration often results from unfulfilled expectations. Nothing beats that feeling of winning ‘in the moment’.
I find it infinitely easier to let go of the pain by minimizing expectations and it’s something being a fan of Buffalo sports has taught me over the years… and I’m thankful for that experience. So while people may be fuming about the NFL being rigged… or whether or not Beane or McDermott should be fired… or any other overreaction the day after a brutal loss I find myself actually finding humor in our frustration.
Because if you made our history as sports fans into a movie, it actually IS ‘Buffalo 66’.
Vincent Gallo knows.
Here we are 60 years later and we are all still Jan Brown.
But don’t feel sorry for us because we are a resilient community of people who for the most part aren’t afraid to laugh at ourselves or be laughed at. We will yell, whine, whimper, and complain… and then we will pick ourselves up and get on with our lives.
Editor’s babble: No pity party here. So what if we’re now 95% scar tissue instead of just 90%? You can find me on X @RobynMundyWYO but maybe less often than usual until the dust settles. However, I fully expect Dean Kindig to blow open the blog very soon with NFL draft data.
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