BUFFALO — They endure these harsh winters and those who jump at the chance to earn $20 an hour can get to shovel out the snow-engulfed stadium so their beloved Bills can continue their franchise-long quest to win a Super Bowl.
They used to have the Buffalo Braves from 1970-78 to cheer for but now their only professional sports teams are the Sabres, who along with the Vancouver Canucks are the only NHL franchises never to have won a Stanley Cup, and the Bills, who have been knocking on the door since breaking Bill Belichick’s stranglehold in the AFC East for the last four seasons. They had the great Patrick Mahomes on the ropes on Sunday night with this great chance to get to their first AFC Championship game since 2020 against Lamar Jackson in Baltimore.
Only hours earlier, they had been reminded of what true love between a city and its football team looked and sounded like when Detroit wrapped its euphoric arms around its Lions, who beat the Bucs and moved within 60 minutes of their very first Super Bowl appearance.
It was cloudy and cold on The Mourning After Tyler Bass missed the 44-yard field goal Wide Right that might have forced overtime against Mahomes and the Chiefs but did not. Wide Right 33 years after Scott Norwood missed his Wide Right 47-yard field goal that would have beaten the Bill Parcells Giants in Super Bowl XXV.
They were still wearing their Bills caps and Starter jackets as they trudged through the pockets of snow that litter the city, still trying to BILLIEVE through the heartbreak. Heartbreak that led to an inexcusable display of frustration and anger, pelting Mahomes and Chiefs with snowballs when the dream was over.
“Confused … heartbroken … sad,” Mario Bucolo was saying, and not even a lunch at Duff’s Famous Wings could change anything. He had flown in from Charlotte. “Like every year we say, ‘Next Year’ and then we say the same thing and it’s been five or six years now, so … it’s tough. Hard to swallow.”
It’s been forever, actually, and old-timers who rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers remember the pain of “Wait ’Til Next Year,” after losing five World Series to the Yankees before Johnny Podres won Game 7 of the 1955 Series for the Boys of Summer.
Here in Buffalo, they keep waiting for their Boys of Winter.
Dennis Vendetta is in his mid-60s. He was standing outside Duff’s with Bucolo and Matthew Vendetta, his nephews.
“I’ve been suffering for a lot of years,” he said.
He is from nearby Lockport, N.Y. and, of course, he recalls Norwood.
“It’s like something’s over Buffalo that’s stopping us from advancing as far as we want to be, or as far as we want to get to,” he said.
Something’s over Buffalo?
“Some people like to think that maybe it’s like a jinx or a something,” Vendetta said, and here Bucolo interjected: “Curse.” Vendetta continued, “A curse or something over us. The four Super Bowls in a row, Wide Right should have been ours. They just can’t seem to get that final piece of the puzzle put in place. But we just keep trudging along, and I’m getting a little bit older, and I sometimes now want to think, ‘Just please one more before I leave here’ (laugh).”
The Jets have their long-suffering fans but at least they’ll always have Jan. 12, 1969.
Jeremy Poisson was at Chiefs 27, Bills 24 at Highmark Stadium. He was wearing a Bills Starter jacket.
“Looking forward to next year. That’s what we do here in Buffalo,” he said, and chuckled.
He lives in Michigan now but knows what the Bills mean to the city.
“It is the city,” Poisson said. “They don’t have anything else. The Sabres haven’t been good, and haven’t been in the playoffs since 2011, and the Bills are really … the town will be depressed for a whole year.”
A whole year?
“I think so. ’Til the season picks up again,” Poisson said.
Jordan Fried flew in for the game from Puerto Rico. He was waiting with Poisson to be seated at Duff’s.
“His generation at least got to see the Super Bowl runs,” Fried said. “I was born in ’89, so my generation, we’ve only known the Music City Miracle [a Miracle for the Titans] — we’ve only known heartbreak. I just want to see us make it to one Bowl, right? I want to win an AFC Championship game. I have three boys at home, too. I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever see it, so it doesn’t feel good.”
Fried’s brother-in-law Adam Goczo and father-in-law, Joszef, who was wearing a Bills wool cap, walked in and joined them. They had flown in from Budapest for the game.
“Hopefully the future is gonna be a bit brighter,” Adam Goczo said.
Jeff Jarnot had driven from Ashburn, Va., to watch Mahomes versus Josh Allen.
“Tough day today,” Jarnot said. A tough day they had not expected here. Mahomes was at their place this time. He was in Kansas City when he eliminated the Bills in the 2020 AFC Championship game and again the following year in the divisional round when he needed only the last 13 seconds to tie the game and won it in overtime with Allen never getting a chance.
“It’s just the love that’s there, and the Bills Mafia … you watch the way the Bills Mafia parties but you watch the way they donate, I mean, they’re just great people,” Jarnot said. “Friends of mine come up to games that are Baltimore fans, or Steeler fans, and they’re like, ‘Yeah you guys got something going on here.’ They just see the love that we have for our team.”
Jarnot was in college when the Jim Kelly Bills got to those four consecutive Super Bowls.
“We shoulda won the first one,” he said. That was Norwood’s Wide Right. “The other three we played some really good teams but we really shoulda won the first one.”
Sometimes you can’t help but become a fatalist. Poisson watched Wide Right I on TV. Wide Right II would haunt him in person.
“We actually thought he was gonna miss it,” Poisson said.
And now yet another winter of discontent in Buffalo.
