Buffalo Bills: Why My Veins Run Red, White, and Blue

With a history like, wide right, homerun throwback, losing four Super Bowls, a historical winning percentage of .475, why am I a Buffalo Bills fan?

The simple, but most cliché answer is that the team is a part of me. My veins and the veins of most Western New Yorkers like me, run with Bills red, white, and blue.

You see, Buffalo is different than most cities when it comes to its professional sports. This is not an attempt to take anything away from other football-frenzied areas, but Western New York just simply cares more. We, as a community, are on top of the world when they win, and bitterly crushed when they lose.

Watching the Bills in defeat is like being punched in the stomach. Not only did the organization lose; the entire city lost.

Since the team’s inaugural season in 1960, a tradition has been established in this rust belt city by Lake Erie. Football is not just a game or a form of entertainment here, but instead, it is simply a lifestyle.

With the summer come thoughts of training camp and preseason. The fall brings the excitement and pageantry of another year of Buffalo Bills football and to say the Bills are the talk of the town is an understatement. As the sixteen week season moves to winter and the surface of Ralph Wilson Stadium becomes a frozen tundra of football grandeur, the season’s success rests on making the playoffs.

With the culmination of the previous season comes immediate preparation for the subsequent one. Late winter and spring are occupied by ardent conversations around the water cooler about free agency, the draft, and the ensuing season, which is still many months away.

My point here is that for many of us, Buffalo Bills football is an all-encompassing entity. You learn at a very young age that Sundays in the fall are for family and football. In Buffalo, you are born and raised to be a Bills' fan and the tradition is ingrained in your mind from birth.

Some of my best memories growing up were attending Bills games at Rich Stadium (now Ralph Wilson Stadium) with my father and grandfather, and I look forward to the day when I can do this with a son of my own.  

Simply put, I suppose I am a Bills' fan because I never had the chance to root for another team, nor would I ever want to. There is something about the perennial loser mentality of the team and its fans. Maybe it makes it more fun that the Bills never win. But that first time they do win the Super Bowl—sweet justice for generations worth of frustrations—the ensuing celebration in that city on the shore of Lake Erie will not only relieve the pain of the disappointments and defeats of the past, but make them seem that much more special.