I can date the start of my misery to one snowy night. January 2002, a divisional playoff game in Foxborough, snow coming down sideways, and a Tom Brady fumble ruled an incomplete pass under a rule almost nobody understood. The Tuck Rule. New England kept the ball, Adam Vinatieri kicked one through the blizzard to tie it, and the Patriots won in overtime. That was the night the dynasty took its first breath. My team spent the next twenty years downwind of it.

Two decades of owning January

What followed is the most sustained run of playoff success the sport has seen. Brady and Bill Belichick turned the postseason into a home game, six Super Bowl titles, a stack of AFC Championships, comebacks that had no business working. For a Bills fan it was a long education in second place. I will give myself one bright memory in there. January 2022, our turn at last, a wild-card game in the Buffalo snow where we scored touchdowns on seven straight drives and won 47-17. One night out of twenty years. I took it.

A new team, the same stage

Then the dynasty ended, the old names left, and most of us assumed New England would spend years in the cold. Instead a young team led by quarterback Drake Maye reached Super Bowl LX this past February. They beat the Chargers, then the Texans, then the Broncos in a snowy AFC Championship in Denver to get there. Seattle won the Super Bowl 29-13, two late Maye fumbles turning it, but the run itself was a surprise almost nobody outside New England saw coming.

I do not have to like the Patriots to respect what their Januarys have meant. Twenty years as the team everyone else measured themselves against, and now a young group that found the stage again fast. Patriots fans, your postseason history is the modern benchmark, and I say that as a man who spent most of it watching your team end my seasons. The snow in 2002 started all of it.