Waking up Monday, January 27, 2025, I felt like I had done this all before. I went to bed last with how I think Phil Conners feels as he gets arrested in Groundhog Day after leading cops on a high-speed chase. Let’s see if this is actually real.
I woke up in my bed. Immediately, a sense of dread came over me. This is my reality. A reality in which the Buffalo Bills were once again eliminated from playoff contention by the Kansas City Chiefs. Four out of the last five seasons have ended that way. Each year I fall asleep wondering if sleeping would change the outcome. Like the world around me is the dream, and going to sleep is actually me waking up to reality. Each year when I wake up, the loss by the Buffalo Bills still remains true. They lost.
I am not an Advanced Stats guy or an Eye Test guy. I don’t claim to know the game better than the coaches or players. I never played above JV football and varsity hockey in my athletic career. Far be it from me to diagnose the Xs and Os of a professional (American) football game. I don’t know why the NFL refuses to use technology that already exists to spot the football; I don’t know if Ty Johnson touching the ball more than James Cook on the Josh Allen Legend Drive™ was the right call. I have never tried to call plays from a booth against a sure-fire Hall of Fame Coordinator. I doubt in the moment I would always make the right call.
My first real memory, like a clear memory, as a human is of the Music City Miracle/Home Run Throwback. January 8, 2000, I remember Steve Christie trotting out on the field to kick the go-ahead field goal, his uniform crisp and bright white. Seeing the ball go through the uprights, the absolute jubilation from my parents in our little living room in Cheektowaga. Items falling off the entertainment center that housed the brick of television my future stepdad owned. I remember hearing my mom ask:
“Is there any way they can win?”
My stepdad replied, “Only if they run it back.” As Kevin Dyson crossed the goal line, I turned to my stepdad with tears in my eyes and screamed, “YOU DID THIS!” The rest is history—Tennessee dances their way to the Big Game and loses in their own heartbreaking fashion as Kevin Dyson comes up short of the goal line to tie the game and more than likely win the game. There has always been speculation amongst Bills fans about that year's defense. If they get past Tennessee, it’s them in the Super Bowl, and who knows if Wade Phillips had a masterful defensive performance drawn up.
Around the same time, I played hockey around the same time with Grant Ledyard and one of Lindy Ruff’s sons. Lindy’s son is why we got to play one of those scrimmages during the 1st intermission of a Sabres game once. There’s an old photo my grandma likes to point to on the walls of her house. It’s up there next to another picture of me outside Ralph Wilson Stadium before the Winter Classic, next to a third of me sitting in a lawn chair in a Flutie jersey before a Bills game.
Within 3 years my stepdad’s job required us to leave the Buffalo area, as described by my family at the time as “a dying city.”. His company was another in a long line of them since the 1980s closing down shop in the city. Moving meant being away from everything Buffalo, obviously, but I soon learned it meant defending myself from children and adults alike when I would wear Bills gear. Not ever physically, but emotionally. I remember grown-ass adults asking me why I was a Bills fan of all teams, pontificating about what life was like for the people of a city whose team lost 4 straight Super Bowls. Having been born after that team's heyday, I couldn’t speak to that. I could speak to the unadulterated joy of tailgating with my family for a preseason game, my face painted along with 50,000 screaming fans for a game against the Colts that didn't matter. I remember how nice and friendly everyone was when they found out it was my first Bills game. Those asks became more frequent as the Bills moved further and further away from their last trip to the playoffs.
As the Bills entered year 6 of the playoff drought, I remember my stepdad, born in the 60s, having seen OJ, the Dolphin drought, having dealt with me wearing the tape out of his copy of Super Bowl 25 as I made him break down in excruciating detail why plays went the way they did, always through the wide right call. My stepdad started being less enthusiastic about the Bills. He said, towards the start of the season, maybe before the preseason, he said, “Tyler, I think I’m getting too old for this.” I was in middle school; the concept didn’t compute. How could one be too old for loving their hometown team? Especially as close as you had been to tasting greatness. How could you not live on the feelings that come with the precipice of a new season? The hope, the anticipation, the hope that after a 9-7 with the right tweaks and injury luck, your favorite could sneak in, the hope tank refilled being in Chicago for their Super Bowl run in 2006. How could you not believe that J.P. Losman and Lee Evans would get the job done of winning enough games to get to the playoffs if Rex Grossman and Kyle Orton could be dragged by Brian Urlacher and Lance Briggs to a Super Bowl? It went for Kelly Holcomb, Trent Edwards, Fitzmagic, and EJ.
I am a Buffalo Sabres fan before I am a fan of anything else. In addition to wearing out the tape of Super Bowl 25, I wore out this tape my stepdad got from his old boss of the 5-year anniversary of the Sabres or something to that effect. It covered their inception through the ‘77-’78 season, maybe?. Learning about the French Connection, The Fog Game, Jim Schonfeld, and the Zamboni brawl gave way to Mike Ramsey, Tom Barasso, and then to Grant Fuhr, Mogilny's 76—which my stepdad argued should have been half Pat LaFontaine’s. Jimmy Hoffa is buried at the Meadowlands, May Day, Dominik Hasek, and Deadline deals for Steve Hinez and Doug Gilmore. Don’t even get me started on the ‘05-’06 and ‘06-’07 Sabres teams.
Or the ‘99 team.
Which my stepdad always had a thing about. The vitriol that man carried for Gary Bettman could power 100 homes for 5 years, I’m sure of it. Brett Hull’s skate was in the crease, and the rule said plain as day you couldn't do that. Buffalo being Buffalo and Dallas being the hot new expansion team that the league was determined to make work.
I remember the sincere hopelessness in his voice when he was trying to explain to a young child what an embezzlement scandal was and how it affected the Sabres payroll that year or why the Sabres best players were leaving during free agency after having played chicken all year with Drury and Brière.
I know I have done this for several pages, but I am not trying to launch names and dates at you, audience. I am simply trying to give context for my being.
Our most recent conversations are telling—he doesn't go out of his way to watch the Bills even though they’re on national TV quite a bit. He’s told me over and over he can’t get up for Bills or Sabres games anymore (the Sabres are another story altogether). He’s much older now. In his early 60s, he experienced the heartbreaks, the reinvention, the death, and the promise of rebirth of his hometown. When do we decide enough pain is enough? After years of going through the cycle of hope and despair. It can wear on a person. Not having any sort of reward to show for it, the letdown becomes more and more drastic. The rollercoaster of emotions of being a diehard fan takes a toll. He’s used phrases like “cursed city” and “perpetual losers.”.
I always bristled. His words immediately took me back to the times when I was a kid defending the honor of my hometown with all the bluster a child could muster. I revered the city that I came from so much. That my grandmother still calls home. He was born and raised and spent a large portion of his life there. How could he turn his back on the city and teams that he taught me to love? Perhaps I am oversimplifying his feelings. He has said he doesn’t watch games, and as he’s gotten older, he’s spent his time doing other things. Bike riding, traveling, going to concerts. Worrying about the ills of the world and complaining about my generation. All more important than the wins and losses that rack up over a Bills or Sabres season.
How do you keep the hope tank full year after year? What does that even mean? I attribute it to the morning sports radio show that I listen to. They have referred to their “hope tank,” usually determining how they feel about a team or a season. I always kind of picture it located where the appendix is with a gasoline-style gauge that becomes more and less full as days and events come to pass.
What is hope but just the belief in something better?
The gauge for me always used to return to full when the days started becoming noticeably shorter. You know? The sunsets in August always seem to come in a deep orange, and whatever science of color refraction occurs with the blue in turning the sky a magnificent red. Leaves change color; the year starts to end seasonally, but the football season is just beginning. Each season rolls around, a new cast of characters to root for. The sins of the past season have been washed away by the murmur of ambition that comes with free agency, the fictitious-sounding dollar amounts being delegated to guys who want to come play in my hometown, and becoming an expert on backup players to fulfill your narrative. Prognosticating on 18-24-year-old kids on who has “it.”. Worrying about hand sizes and pull-up counts. Fandom makes an Armchair GM™ of me. Pouring over articles and soundbites to reinforce my talking points that my hometown team has a shot at the playoffs. How this year is our year.
But in recent years, as I have aged into a full-grown adult with a wife, a job, 3 dogs, and bills, the fresh horrors of life have all made it harder to still have hope. As you age, the heartbreak wears as you experience more and more of it. Like the beating of an adze on a log, the letdowns from life are worn and reshaped. I am not saying my life has been some sort of Shakespearean tragedy, but the totality of life and Buffalo sports fandom has given me pause as to how much I can invest when training camp opens up.
As I sit here now, several days removed from the end of the Bills season, in the depths of another abysmal Sabres season, what I feel like is that the dreams of a Bills or Sabres championship are never to come to fruition. I worry if I keep completely giving up caring, that would be the thing that finally sets the teams right, and they win it all. And I don't get to have it mean as much to me as it would have. Like dousing my fandom at all will diminish how much it means to me when the eventual win comes. There are people who argue we, as Americans, have bigger things to worry about than Super Bowl or Stanley Cup winners.
And people do. I am concerned about everything that is currently happening under the current administration, re: regime. And the maligned combination of a crushing Bills loss, Trump's inauguration, and another forgettable Sabres season. (Point out the one that doesn’t fit.)
Not all hope diminishes the same way, or is it the same kind of hope.
My hope in humanity is not the same “hope tank” for sports. They are separate pools to be filled from different streams.
Humanity comes from the world around me, the news, social media, and my community. Most recent election results and the fallout from that have severely depleted my hope tank. The stream that fills it is running dry. The banks give way to ground that has hardened and crumbles. It’s not bone-dry, but the typical things that allow me to believe in a better tomorrow are dwindling.
Sports is its own tributary that flows into the river of hope. Flowing forth from the mountains of the Sports Gods. Sports is a place people in all walks of life can come together to share a human experience. When the optimism you feel for your favorite team is high, that’s the river running mighty like the Mississippi. The confidence can carve through layers of rock and into the crust of the Earth.
I think my hope tank is running low, but with the passing of time, as distance from the last loss becomes a fainter memory, the hope will build, slowly, like the beating of drums beating faster and faster. Until we exist under the blood-red sky with the air beginning to get the faintest balm. When wind picks up as sports fans begin whispering prayers and wishes, sending them up the mountain to the sports gods, all hoping for a successful season, sweeps through the streets. It is my Sisyphiousian task to carry hope. To root for my teams in good times, and bad. To root for humanity in good times, and bad. I do my best to be happy while carrying hope. To believe in finally getting to the top of the mountain, to imagine a world where the good thing does happen and the other shoe doesn’t drop.
Sometimes in the moments of hopelessness, what echoes in my mind is the Child’s Ballad that Marv Levy read to the Bills as they flew home to Buffalo following the Super Bowl XXV loss:
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay mee downe and bleed a-while,
And then I'le rise and fight againe."
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