For me, the glory days are a story, not a memory. I came in around 1995, a year or two too late for the best team this city has ever had. I have no memory of sitting beside my dad watching the Bills reach four straight Super Bowls, because by the time I understood the game, those four trips were already four straight losses. Wide right. The greatest comeback in league history, thirty-two points down on the Oilers, won. Four straight AFC titles and not one Lombardi to show for them. I inherited the heartbreak without the glory. That is the most Buffalo thing there is.

The tail, and the miracle that wasn’t

There was still some good left when I joined. We won a playoff game in 1995. Jim Kelly played his last down in 1996. Then on January 8, 2000, a kickoff, a lateral, the Music City Miracle, and the Titans walked us out 22-16. I did not know it at the time. That was the door closing, and it stayed closed for seventeen years.

Seventeen years in the cold

From 2000 to 2016 we did not make the playoffs once. Not once. The longest active drought in the NFL, a new quarterback what felt like every other year, and a city that kept filling a freezing stadium for a team that gave it nothing back but next season. We got very good at hoping. When it finally broke in 2017 we needed Andy Dalton and the Bengals to beat Baltimore while we watched and prayed. We got in. We lost 10-3 in Jacksonville. We did not care. We were back.

Allen, and the wall

Then Josh Allen made us real. The 2020 run reached the AFC Championship for the first time since 1993, and there the wall was waiting, the one still standing today. Kansas City. Thirteen seconds, January 2022, a game we had already won until we hadn’t, 42-36 in overtime. The Chiefs have ended our season four times in five years, the most recent a back-and-forth 32-29 conference title game in January 2025. Last January it was the Broncos instead, in overtime, in the divisional round, and that loss cost Sean McDermott his job. Joe Brady has it now.

Seven straight Januaries, the longest active playoff streak in football. Four Super Bowls, none won, and counting. Thirty years in, and I have still never watched this team win its last game of the year. Maybe that is the deal. You do not back the Bills for the ending. You back them for the fact they keep showing up. So do we.