The Outlander

On November 29th, 2010 I was doing what I typically do on Sundays late in the Bills season: running errands. On this day, that meant the laundromat down the road from my apartment in Barre, Vermont. The Bills were 2-8, the Steelers 7-3 and in my mind, there was far too much bullshit in my life to let the Bills be part of it. I’d graduated law school a year earlier, entering the workforce with literally the worst graduating year in post-war American history, and my situation at the time reflected that. My 650 foot studio apartment was above the homeowners, a batshit Christian family who homeschooled their kids, one of whom seemed almost certain to commit a mass murder one day. After bringing a girl home one night, I got a call forbidding that in the future (I was 25). I’d made up excuses when my parents would ask to visit, embarrassed that, to my dismay my hastily thought out plan of filling my Buick with my shit and driving 8 hours to take a $14 an hour job wasn’t working out as well as I’d hoped. I’d been the first in my family to go to college, fulfilled the plan I’d had since I was in middle school to get my law degree and in the months following that I’d had an engagement fall apart, found only a $10 an hour data entry position as firms implemented hiring freezes, been put in the hospital from a viral heart infection and shared the tiny apartment with my mom that I’d lived in since I was five. Completely out of ideas I’d hopped in the car to the most isolated place I could think of and only four months in it was becoming apparent that I’d miscalculated, again.

What I’m saying is, I really didn’t need the Bills in my life that day. But it was the laundromat and it was back when you could stream the radio feed for free so there I sat, listening to the game to drown out the sounds of the small child and large dog that also found themselves spending a Sunday afternoon in a miserably boring situation.

They’d been down 13-0 at the half but had made it 13-10 when they forced a turnover and suddenly the idea of missing a comeback upset win for laundry of all fucking things was unacceptable. Eschewing the second load, I headed to Mulligan’s Pub, my go-to since it was both walking distance from my place and the only joint in town with the NHL package. On the way I tossed on the authentic Poz jersey my ex had gotten me for my 24th birthday and eagerly sidled up to the bar where a gaggle of fans rooting for various teams had gathered at tables behind me to watch their games on the bank of televisions.

You probably know by now that this was the Stevie Johnson game. It’s something seared into my brain, staring absently at the television, thoughts skidding down the slipperiest of slopes, turning this Billsy moment in a lost season into something much larger, something personal and more sinister, an indictment of my decision making that went far beyond driving the half mile to the bar. I heard the voice from one of the tables behind me, a woman’s voice. I hadn’t said anything since the drop, hadn’t turned around, interacted or barely moved aside from taking pulls of my blue light.

“That guy in the Bills jersey looks so sad.”

The Barrister

​One of the things we like to tell ourselves, whether we live in Buffalo or have expatriated to some predictable metropolis on one coast or continent or another, is how great we are at the task of sticking by each other. It's the Scarlet Letter emblazoned on our identity as a community, as individuals. Related: I'm terribly shitty at metaphors, a bumbling frontal lobe addicted to adjectives that I stuff into a crack pipe stinking of emotions, so just pretend that the Scarlet Letter is less a letter than a standing Buffalo, less an indictment than a badge of honor; pretend that Arthur Miller didn't need to write that play and that American ancestry can't be tracked to fucking witch burning.

I think about that kind of self-characterization often. From my perch in my Times Square law office, from McFaddens and Kelly's and all the Buffalo bars we choose to squeeze out of the stone of New York City life, it can feel incredibly accurate, that self-congratulatory superiority arising from the combination of Buffalo's Midwestern neighborly charm and its New York ego, because so much of that identity from this perch of mine is restricted to the high fives and Shout! call and response that litter sidewalks outside of games, on trains and in traffic, wherever two or three are gathered and things of that nature. We can stick by each other in those moments because the job of doing so is so so easy, so so straightforward. So time-limited. We can ignore the bullshit parts of Buffalo, the moments where Buffalo falls tragically short, the moments Buffalo reveals itself to be the kind of place willing to turn its back on its own, to decide that certain parts of Buffalo are actually Other, are actually deserving of exclusion.

A week and a half ago, The Buffalo News published an article by Kim Martin, a reporter none of us knew all that well because she's only been writing for TBN for a couple months. Martin had interviewed Tyrod Taylor, and the substance of what they talked about was incredibly important. The piece, if standing alone in a national and historical context, is as uncontroversial as one can probably get at this American moment, as is Taylor's identification of a the unmistakable Truth of the impossibly high standards placed on him as a mobile black QB, specifically, and as a black man, generally. It's a Truth that needs to be cried out from the rooftops as much as possible; a Truth that, frankly, is the kind of thing we should have gotten right with over a century ago. Longer, probably. Football fans see the disparity every. fucking. weekend, and even more so of late. The coin in play has many sides - slavery is prison labor is Jim Crow is denigrating marchers in Selma is killing Emmett Till is killing Trayvon, Freddie, Tamir, Sandra, Kalief is the evolution of the prison industrial complex is the idea that black folks don't actually deserve success is the idea that white people are the arbiters of fairness is the idea that playing the game the right way is some static, knowable standard is the idea that black bodies cannot have agency, cannot speak, cannot protest, cannot demand anything for themselves and for their lives without being told that they ask for too much.

That black Americans are required, by (white) communal fiat, to be a certain way: perfect. Whatever that means.

If you wake up every day with the knowledge that this Truth is woven deeply into the fabric of our national and local identity, that it's shaped every year of American life, well, the comments made by Taylor, the piece published by Martin, it all goes without saying. Obviously we all don't wake up every day giving a shit about that Truth, and many of you have stopped reading because hell if you're going to listen to my run-on sentences wax on about the fundamental unfairness of the heightened expectations - the expectations demanded at end of a sword or a gunbarrel - that continue to persist in this grand American experiment we were born into. Hell if you're going to listen to me go to war for social justice, or whatever.

A week and a half ago, The Buffalo News published Kim Martin's article on Tyrod taylor and less than a week later, with scattered rumors of unhappy Buffalo writers gracing group chats and DMs and tweets, with sports consumers in Buffalo and elsewhere scoffing at the idea of racial bias against Taylor, Martin announced she was leaving TBN for WaPo where she will be covering Dan Snyder's Washington Football Team. This decision, I must imagine, had less to do with bias in her work environment than the fact it's the Washington Post. All the same, by Friday, as I drove up to Buffalo in advance of the Bills game against Tampa, the rumor mill had doubled down in response to the news of her elevation to a national publication, and it became clear that, to many, Kim Martin was not welcome in Buffalo. Her work was deemed awful, devalued by members of the Buffalo media elite (lol) and sports fans alike; she was accused on twitter and elsewhere of having not earned her job, of having taken work from other writers more deserving of column inches and page views. In just two months, a writer that had given us a phenomenally truthful look into what it's like to play under center in Buffalo while being black, was equated to just another person of color who took what was rightfully whites'.

She isn't perfect, you see.

Buffalo is a place where we have each other's backs until it isn't.

The idea that Martin isn't a perfect writer is a hill no one need die on because we have no perfect writers; we only have the best that writers choose to give us. She need not be perfect to have value to our discourse, to the product that the Buffalo News puts out, particularly insofar as Buffalo continues to insist on getting its discourse served almost exclusively through the mouths of white men. Surely, given the quality of the work TBN produces sometimes, it shouldn't be required that she even be particularly good, though she is that. She's not a perfect writer but for many she was a necessary one; necessary because no matter how woke the men she's leaving behind might try to be, the proof is in the work they've done and haven't done; the proof is in Tyrod Taylor being in his third year as Buffalo's starting QB and it taking that long to be asked the right questions by a reporter he was willing to give truly truthful answers, questions that have been apparent as fuck to those of us paying attention. And, even if we like the guys that remain in Buffalo sports media, that interview, that topic ain't getting covered as well, if at all, by Jerry Sullivan or Howard Simon.

A week and a half ago, The Buffalo News published Martin's piece on Taylor, Martin announced her departure from TBN less than a week later, rumors swirled about animosity in the media ranks, I drove to Buffalo and watched Taylor pull off some GD miracles, and drove home Monday morning listening to people call WGR to express their displeasure with Taylor, asking for Nate Peterman to get playing time. This happens after every game, no matter if Taylor wins or loses. A player good enough and exciting enough to be put on a box of off-brand frosted flakes in my dumb hometown, a player who gave a stadium full of people everything he had on Sunday and got the win, improbably, got derided instead, got called out instead. A player whose flaws are somehow amplified by his melanin, who is likely taking his place in a long line of brilliant yet flawed players of color who have been run out of town on a wave of mostly white criticism.

Because he isn't perfect, you see.

Buffalo is a place where we have each other's backs until it isn't, until that other is other, is black. Then? All bets are off.

(Note: an earlier published draft neglected to make clear that Martin's move to WaPo was likely unrelated to the animosity she apparently elicited amongst her media peers. Apologies for being more vague than intended.)

The Barrister

In some ways, this blog and others like it are as simple as a negative proof of the product we've all set out to digest on a daily weekly annual basis. Where the Bills sell hope and change like they're running for something other than Regional Fuckboi, this space sells despair. There's a surplus and we'd like to unload it off our books, I figure, and it's a goddamn bargain for those interested in investing in distressed emotional debt.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention, while we're still processing my brutal metaphors, that my mission here is to write about our Bills in spite of myself and in spite of our Bills, that my brain is mush and can't possibly be asked to form coherent takes, and that here, by the grace of God go I, is where I am basically because Apologist said "hey write that recap" while we parted at a lonely midtown street corner some time ago.

Fuck the Bills and Love the Bills, alas and so on and so forth.

If time is a flat circle, as some claim it is, we're blessed to experience this kind of Bills team only once but also infinity times, so it's an open question whether that 3 point loss in Miami should be eminently shrug-off-able as 'just a thing that happened' or emotionally paralyzing as 'the thing that just happens every fuck-all time.' We're somewhere in the middle, most of us, and it's frankly just as dark a corner of cerebral sub-consciousness as sports can get. The cruelty of belief is that it's is a massively marketable phenomenon to attach to any given team, and many of us have been all-too-willing to hitch ourselves to the hope cultivated and farmed for the benefit of our preferred clubs, irrationality be fucked.

The cruelty of belief is that it is equal parts goodness and elusiveness, the treasure at the end of the rainbow, sight unseen.

Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of Billschausen syndrome, you either got all in with this team recently (Hi!) or were on the precipice (or you billieve unconditionally, in which case why are you here?), and depending on where you fall, you're either out now, huffing and puffing about the uselessness of it all, or at the very least have a foot in the door open while you consider things like whether you left the oven on and, if so, whether it might be more useful to stick your head right up in it on Sundays because why let this team suck the life out of you when you're fully capable of killing yourself all on your own.

In the same way that people are drawn to comments sections and cable news out of morbid curiosity at the train wreck humans involved, being a fan of this team is very much about the allure of something so earth-shatteringly shitty that you sort of need to crane your head to look. Besides, there's virtue in learning to repackage the experience of watching a terrible football team into a fun exercise in schadenfreude and moral superiority. So long as the team is going to trip over its own putrid tendencies towards failure, we may as well alight our hearts with ideas that we deserve better and that we have answers that would fix what ails our Bills, if only if only if only. So long as this team is going to struggle through another fall as if it's the harvest and they're farming melancholy, we may as well pull out a dictaphone and assemble a cacophony of sarcasm and derision as tribute to the Wagon-Circling Buffalo Bills, the only team that would consider it a badge of pride that they left home without a map, keep taking the wrong trail and have yet again stumbled upon some band of horsemen or patriots or birds or marine mammals or whatnot, thereby necessitating wagon circling from the get.

tl;dr: When you live in Chump City, it's no consolation that you've been elected mayor.

Don't get me wrong: I'm *still* hopeful, and therein lies the annoying and inestimable rub. All they gotta do is win this weekend and they'll show us they really are the team we hope them hahahahahahahahaha hahahaha.

Fuck it. Let's do the damn thing, I guess.

The Apologist

Football is hard. Absurdly hard. Hard to watch, hard to play, and hard to justify. It's become easier for people to explain why they're not getting their kids vaccinated than why they continue watching football. St. Louis is still paying off the debt on their now unoccupied football stadium. Every team only just figured out they should stop paying Greg Hardy to play football (but apparently the Pats should kick the tires on Ray Rice ... good God, Lupica). Teddy Bridgewater's career might have ended while pretending to play. And if his career is over, he'd be considered LUCKY by most NFL retirees' standards. Calvin Johnson just quit at the peak of his powers because of course he did. But it’s become like complaining about your taxes. Yours are too high? Join the club. Pay ‘em and move along, you’re holding up the line. The NFL is everything that's wrong with humanity and capitalism? Sure, but you're still gonna keep watching.

So all existential crises aside, the hard part of football I'm here to discuss is winning and, more importantly, it's correlation to our enjoyment of the game. For better or worse, that's what makes all the other parts of football tolerable. Calvin Johnson might still be playing football if the Lions weren't, well, you know... the Lions. But as fans, complaining about wins, or the lack thereof, has become a competitive sport in its own right. Who has more to complain about? 31 teams end every season disappointed. Yeah, sure, but look at THIS bullshit team I have to deal with. Hell, even the people who cover the league are creating storylines to complain about.

​Simple math says the teams we root for are more likely to fail at their ultimate goal than succeed. But who REALLY has it worse? Is it worse to be at the bottom of the barrel looking up? Is it worse to float in middling mediocrity, missing out equally on big draft picks and big moments? Or is it truly worse to come this close to your goal only to have it ripped away from you?

I've been asking myself this because, from my vantage point, ​Bills fandom has reached a particularly masochistic level this offseason. My friends have been competing to see who can expect less from this team than the other. A recent text exchange raised the question of what their record would be this season and I was the only person who thought they would win more games than they would lose and it wasn't even close (the "best" prediciton was 7-9). This might seem like an obvious, understandable sentiment to some people, but it really got me thinking. It feels like enjoying the game and not enjoying the game are on equal footing now. And to be fair, watching the Patriots so you can talk shit about Tom Brady does sound like more fun than watching whatever it is the Tennessee Titans are going to try and accomplish this year. Particularly when it comes to your own allegiances, I understand where this instinct comes from. If you think you’re going to be let down, why not lower your expectations as far as possible so that the let-down is more tolerable?

The problem is that this hypothesis has been proven false again and again and again. We can tell ourselves all we want that they’re going to lose this Sunday, but if they jump out early and take a lead into halftime, we will get excited. We will have hope. We will also have that knot in our stomach, but that’s the whole point. That’s why we watch. As soon as I stop feeling things during these games, I’m not sure why I’d watch them anymore. If all I wanted to do was have a logical, measured experience of football, I’d drop all allegiances and tune into whatever game is being called by Joe Buck. Sad!

So if I’m gonna have my heart ripped out and my mind turned into a scene from Falling Down, then I’m gonna go into it with the best of intentions. Or to use a different hacky reference, if we’re all going to wind up in the Pit of Despair, then damnit, I’m gonna expect the best on my way down.

I mean, this IS supposed to be fun right?! For fucks’ sake, remember when we weren’t going to have a team at all anymore?!?  By the grace of God, fracking, and Terry Pegula, the Rams are in LA and the Bills are talking about a downtown stadium. But like a real one this time. Our team was saved, but somehow our doomsday expectations stayed six and a half feet under. I’m not saying everyone should be expecting a record over .500 like I am, but where is the proof that we’re one of the worst teams in the league? Seventeen teams finished last season with worse records than ours. One of the ones who finished above us, our divisional rivals the LOLJets, spent the entire offseason trying to convince others that they had convinced themselves that they could do better than Ryan Fitzpatrick. Hell, the Super Bowl champions TRADED for Mark Sanchez. (Seriously, how many teams would cut their quarterback in a heartbeat to get their hands on Tyrod Taylor? If the Eagles were able to get a first round pick for Sam Bradford, a quarterback whose ceiling we’re all painfully aware of, what could the Bills have gotten in exchange?) Somehow Raiders fans have more faith than we do! For the life of me, I can’t understand it.

I know it’s a somewhat weak argument to make: Being optimistic is more fun. But that’s how I feel. If you want to wallow in self-pity and disappointment, don’t let me stop you. In fact, maybe stop reading right now, because it only gets sunnier from here. Translation: DON’T RAIN ON MY PARADE, GOD DAMNIT! THE BILLS ARE BACK AND I’LL FUCKIN' SHOUT IF I WANT TO!

The Barrister​

(NB: Apologist will follow this with something more upbeat for the "has yet to succumb to crippling angst over their preferred sports teams yet" crowd, so feel free to skip this, but in the meantime it's time to flex some muscles and get a little stretch in. It’s been a while. Clear eyes, full hearts, can definitely lose it's actually likely.)

At a certain point after I left New York City to inexplicably put down some roots in the Garden State, after I decided to scale my day-to-day to a new place and new routine, new people and new options, I started thinking a lot about the legacy that our interests and priorities leave with us. This is often little more than self-indulgent introspection, for sure, but when you have some extra commuting time on your hands and most of that is sitting down on a regional train service that makes the NYC subway look like a frenetic cattle car complete with all the physio-fecal smells you come to expect, it's not the worst thing to make an effort to use the time to your advantage. It’s a pretty dumb habit in a lot of ways, most notably because I’m liable to get hung up on certain problems or anxieties at inappropriate times, including times when I'm by no means alone, which makes the whole exercise self-defeating sometimes. 

By way of example - which is not needed to illustrate the point but since when is necessity a prerequisite? - this past weekend I went to a small wedding with some old friends and as I navigated the evening with my too-good-for-me wife, the pitfalls for an extroverted over-sharer like myself were everywhere. By the time the after-party kicked into gear, my BAC checking in at a respectable clip and my six foot two inch frame questioning its close relationship with me given my inability to sit still during a Bruno Mars song, I was in a really good place. And when I say good, I obviously mean that I was telling way too many stories about shenanigans both past and present, talking about work way too much and making new best friends that I most surely will never see again.  As my too-good-for-me wife is bound to remind me, frequently, people don’t really care about my shit. The friend of the bride did not love me hijacking a conversation to talk about markets and self-interested fucks who ruin our economy, but that’s where my head was at after the handful of Finger Lakes Rieslings, I was having a moment and needed to work through it, and also I totally apologized later and we ended up having a hilarious night and homegirl is on that list of great humans and new best friends that I will definitely forget to keep in touch with. 

To put it a different way, introspection is not really a team sport, by its nature, but man do I like to triage my bullshit out in plain view. I totally get that people aren’t necessarily on board, especially when they’ve known me for all of twenty minutes, it’s just that I don’t really care.

In the midst of these indulgent bullshit problems I let consume me as I seek a less arduous, more interesting way to get through each day without feeling some vaguely defined weight on my shoulders, constructed by a job that delightfully lays waste to my health and well-being and a home I feel like is being held together by duct tape and hasty prayers to no one in particular, the decisions about how to cut through that bullshit to prioritize the to-do list I have on my plate become a matter of imperatives.

Me? I like to put down markers in my memory, emphasizing what’s important and what experiences get earmarked for consideration at some later date. It’s entirely hokey to discuss, yet nevertheless plainly true for me that life is far easier to manage when you place markers into the dirt along your personal timeline and attempt to categorize information in some useful way. Whether laid down in hindsight or in real time, those notches in our history provide a point of reference within the series of stored memories, making it easier to look back and make sense of the progression of time; easier to lean forward with some degree of well-defined perspective on how our past is prologue.  

​So, I suppose, we choose what matters to us and we likewise choose to put down those markers to help us make sense of those valued portions of our life. We power rank the fuck out of our varied interests and dreams and the varied people and places and institutions we consider our own, and in the end we sort the information into buckets and probably power rank the buckets as well. In the first one you get all the non-negotiables, the stuff you can’t live without, and in the last bucket are the frivolities and dreams and luxuries, and somewhere in between is where the shit gets really complicated.

A bunch of nonsense, non-formative moments can be swept under the rug of our subconscious: the time you chatted up someone at a bar out of boredom; the passing moment on a dance floor during yet another wedding reception of yet another friend/cousin/sibling/child; the 18th time you watched a team you love play a milquetoast field-goal-riddled game against some milquetoast squad from some (as it turns out) usefully pathetic city.

A career, a friendship, a love affair, a family? Your list will be different than mine, but when we rank our priorities, when we decide to carve out space in our journey (or not) for those things and let them impact our days in the short-term (or not), the way we sort through our experiences and internalize a memory or a feeling takes on varying degrees of importance. We remember names of family members and concepts necessary for our jobs and how our spouse smelled the first time our kid fell asleep with us on the couch; we probably don’t remember the name of the guy we bump into sometimes on the train, or the way a friend we see twice a year takes her coffee.

And then we have football.

(And yes, I’m aware that I overthink things. If you’re new here, a hearty welp to you. Welcome to the Jungle, we’ve got fun and games and our teams are basically gout.  If you’re not new here, settle the fuck down, and yes that means you Joe Buffalo Wins. I’m sure you have some amazing tweets to ping me with soon, bud, and I’m sure they’ll be really well-phrased.)

 The Scizz

Greetings and Salutations Berls fans! After a three week hiatus from the Bills previews I have returned more confused than ever! What is this team? To me right now, they seem like another 8 – 8 team that will show a glimmer of hope here and there, juuuuuuuust enough to keep us invested, yet ultimately breaking our hearts. Same old song.
It’s been an early season of “What If’s?” all around. What if Buffalo had all their weapons like Sammy, Shady, and Los Williams for every game? What if Tyrod was able to go last week? What if the offensive line could learn how to play football? What if defensive “genius” Rex Ryan sent his front four to destroy the QB more often? (Which any human with even a minuscule knowledge of football knows should be happening by the way.) Hell, what if Fred Jackson was never relea….GOTCHA!

What this all leads back to is that the one game I was the most confident about winning this season, now seems like it has the potential of a disappointment akin to last year’s loss to the Raiders. How has this happened? I have no real answers, but what I can say is that I don’t give a fuck how they do it, but they need to win Sunday morning in London. Maybe they need to sign Bullet Tooth Tony to start shooting players in the knee caps during warm ups. I’m just spit balling here.

​The Barrister

UPDATE: We recorded a carcast en route to the bar to watch the game and Scizz just sent me the audio file from his phone so here it is! Bonus points for listeners who can decipher what's playing on my car radio at any given moment.

That was a fucking splendid afternoon of Buffalo Bills football we got yesterday. Unfuckingreal.

With a season as short as that of the NFL, generally a full week between games, every outing becomes a narrative-guiding metric even if we know it shouldn’t be. We should be able to relax and remain patient while we wait for a more reasonable sample size to come in for evaluation; we should be able to wait to see just how successful our particular squad is and, perhaps even more crucially, how good or awful the opponent really is, before putting much stock into any one week’s result. The Week 1 win against the Colts seems a little less impressive given how poor they’ve looked since; last week’s loss to the Patriots looks a little more forgivable now that we’ve seen another week wherein they dismantled their opposition (albeit to the most dismantle-able team in the league); and now yesterday’s win, well, it is both heartening and devoid of meaning given how good the Bills looked and how bad the Dolphins have been in their three games. 

So, what to make of it? The sample size went up a game, the Rex Ryan-led Bills showed us something new by bouncing back from a brutal day and parlaying their fourth quarter would-be heroics into a massively dominant afternoon against a division rival, and the Dolphins are a dog shit football team that most halfway decent teams should be able to beat. So the Bills are at least halfway decent. Maybe even pretty good since they won by thirty. Maybe stacked with enough talent both on the field and on the sidelines that they can make a true run at a Wild Card. Predictions are dumb in this sport, we’re still talking about less than a quarter of the season in terms of available data, and I’m most certainly wrong due to any combination of the following factors:

1. Any predictions are entirely unable to account for the dumbfuckery of the NFL and its dumbfuck rules and the dumbfuck officials that enforce the aforementioned dumbfuck rules in a way that makes me wonder about the meaning of life and my impending death;
2. #becauseitsbuffalo we will revert to the mean of sadness in substantial measure;
3. The Patriots are developing a plan to thieve the DNA of Buffalo’s skill players and replace it with the genetic code of the morning show guys on WEEI;
4. Tim Graham is bound to snap and murder me or someone I love someday, which is I suppose only sad for me, but fuck you for bringing that up;
5. Paul Hamilton is going to give the team swine flu;
6. The GOP’s insistence on banning stem cell research has stymied UB’s research into curing the Losing Disease, sucks to be us; or
7. Carl Paladino is Buffalo’s version of Adrian Veidt (Watchmen references two weeks in a row, deal with it, chump ass motherfuckers), which means he is (a) creepy as hell with an ugly face, (b) a fucking idiot, and (c) going to send a massive [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS) to [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] us all.  

But seriously, it looks like they’re going to be a good football team and bring us all the happiness we’ve so desperately craved because life always works out and I'm sleep-deprived and a little baked out so really I'm bound to believe anything right now. There's no way (read: every way) this can end badly!
 
Onto the recap!

The Barrister

Sometimes it's really hard, inexplicably hard, to tell whether a moment in our lives really feels different than the ones that came before it, or whether we just want to believe it does for sanity's sake; whether it feels different because of objective facts available to us, or because our subjectivity refracts the available facts to such an extent that we can't help but believe; whether, right here right now, this past Sunday and the forthcoming autumn of 2015 was and is and will be actually, really, truly, objectively different than the morass of turd we've waded through this millennium, or whether we've simply begun yet another another revival of the one-act play we've written in the collective think tank of Bills fans incapable of not simply squeezing the most fun out of whatever it is we got.

We've been here before. Or at least somewhere close enough that a healthy serving of worry isn't necessarily unreasonable. 

Alas. I always go the other way when it's September. 

Objectively, we have a lot of facts available to us that can't be dismissed. The team's ownership is now vested in a new family with vision and resources that haven't been available to the club, well, ever. Their ownership was enabled by one last redeeming act of the club's previous owner, a man so entrenched in days-gone-by that we could not escape the fact that our Bills were always going to be a dozen steps behind as the NFL modernized into its current form of capitalist, monolith juggernaut; a man whose last mic drop was to ensure the Bills stayed in Buffalo and the wealth gleaned from the team's sale would be charitable in its purpose. 

Those facts aside, we remain in a place all-too-familiar: a place of hope without complete reassurance; with optimism based on small sample sizes; with the feeling of progress and the belief in enough rain to end the godforsaken drought we've had. All of it so fucking familiar and very possibly driven more by our persistent need for the sensation of belief than the team's actual capacity to sustain it.


Then again, maybe not. 

Belief ran deep in Orchard Park on Sunday. It was infectious and inescapable, thriving in the early-morning tailgates, reunions with old friends, hugs and high fives and, thankfully, in the stadium itself. It was a feeling like nothing I've felt in years, fuck, like nothing I've dared allow myself to feel.

Holy shit was that belief rewarded. 



THINGS I LIKED: