When the Buffalo Bills’ Tyler Bass missed a field goal wide right on Sunday night, all but ensuring another victory for the Kansas City Chiefs, Minnesota Vikings fans felt a sudden phantom pain, not unlike what an identical twin might suffer when their sibling is injured hundreds of miles away.
It was hard to watch. Bass’s kick didn’t just squeak outside of the upright, it veered away from the goalposts like it was trying to escape Highmark Stadium through a side door. The whole unseemly affair felt like the fickle whim of the football gods, punishing some poor soul for his father’s blasphemy. This was generational torment, passed down like a tragedy of cockeyed genetics.
The agony of sports fandom is a strange phenomenon. It’s an ancient curse, masochism, and a badge of dubious honor, all rolled into one. It’s a bond that unites disparate, desperate cities by the solidarity of chronic hard luck. It transcends franchises and individual sports: the Chicago Cubs, long haunted by a vengeful billy goat’s hex; the Minnesota Timberwolves’ rising like a phoenix from the ashes only to fly straight into a smoldering Webber grill; a Cleveland Browns fanbase sold out by ownership, only to be dragged back into existence just to go through quarterbacks like so many losing pull tabs.
And, of course, the Vikings and the Bills.
Minnesota and Buffalo share a particular variant of anguish, the sting of venom from the same snakebite. We don’t need to linger over the macabre details: the blue-balls ache of almost getting there but never reaching the climax, jilted bridesmaids forcing a smile through a succession of weddings, losses accrued by the narrowest of margins, and a whole cast of characters whose names become shorthand for a single, fatal shortcoming. Gary Anderson. Scott Norwood. Blair Walsh.
Add Tyler Bass to that grim list. Etch it into a stone tablet you can bang your head against the next time a dropped pass or a flubbed extra point turns your jubilant watch party into sitting sports shiva for another squad about to take a long off-season dirt nap.
Why do we go through this? It’s a question no doubt posed by many a friend, family member, and exhausted wife or husband of the perennially downtrodden enthusiast. Perhaps we’re Wylie E. Coyote, lighting the fuse on an Acme rocket that we’re sure will explode the Road Runner in a blaze of glory this time. Or maybe the dark secret is we’ve become so familiar with the pain that we’ve come to need it. It seems an unlikely coincidence that this suffering is heavily concentrated in cold-weather cities where we try to convince ourselves that winter’s wrath builds character. It seems impossible that you could be so aggrieved in San Francisco or sunny Miami. This is a snow-bound, small-city affliction. That’s why the Chargers, wherever they’re stationed at the time, feel fraudulent, even as sad-sacks. Take your complaints for a long walk on the beach, suckers.
The Vikings, the Bills, the Browns, and, until very recently, the Detroit Lions. This is the Loser’s Club of the NFL, even when they’re kinda winning. (You could say the Jets, too, but you ego-centric New Yorkers had the glory days of Broadway Joe, and, besides, anybody who gets in league with Aaron Rodgers deserves every single bad thing that happens to them.)
Of all our fellow conscriptions to the Legion of Gloom, it’s the Bills with whom we most identify, with their January blizzards and finicky kickers. They’re the easiest to root for, partly because they play in the AFC and not a little bit because Josh Allen was kind enough to fumble that snap to provide Minnesota with another improbable one-score comeback victory in 2022. If it can’t be us, it might as well be them.
The Bills loss on Sunday night hurts vicariously both because we know that exact pain, and also because it seems to confirm that they cannot escape their endless cycle of misery. And if they can’t, maybe we can’t either. A Bills Super Bowl victory would be like your neighbor winning the lottery — sure, you don’t actually get any money, but at least you know it’s possible.
But the kick goes wide, again and again. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
