BUNDLE OF JOY
Thrilling end to Bills’ playoff drought the kind of payoff true fans deserve
JOHN Murphy has been in hundreds of locker rooms in his career, and long ago he learned a simple, abiding truth about professional athletes: They don’t care the way fans care, bleed the way they bleed, suffer as they suffer. They can’t. This is their livelihoods, not their obsessions; how often do you cry in your office?
Sunday, Murphy saw something else.
He walked into the Bills’ locker room and he saw players weeping. He saw trainers holding onto other staff members, coaches hugging, holding on for dear life, sobbing. The Bills hadn’t just won a football game, and they seemed to know that already. They’d made an entire city smile. Better: They’d made the football-frenzied fans of that city understand one of the essential lessons of sports.
It really is OK to invests your very soul in these games.es.
It really is OK to love some-omething — as Buffalo loves thehe Bills — that so often, too often, doesn’t love you back. Because sometimes it does. “The emotion was raw, and it was real, and it was overwhelming,” said Murphy, the Bills’ radio play-byplay man who was born and raised in nearby Lockport and has covered Buffalo sports his entire career. “And it was just the beginning.”
There would be a late-night flight home, the plane electric with joy, Bills players basking in the satisfaction of halting a 17-year playoff drought. They already sensed how much what they’d done would mean, because there were thousands of Bills fans who’d trekked to Miami to watch them beat the Dolphins, 22-16, and they’d already heard how just about every one of those fans waited and watched in the stadium concourses afterward to see how the Bengals-Ravens game would turn out.
Richie Incognito, the Bills’ guard and one of their most popular players, had actually invited the fans to meet them at Buffalo Niagara International Airport, tweeting the flight number and pattern. It was a lark. It was snowing and 1 degree in Buffalo, the plane was set to land at 1:30 in the morning, it was New Year’s Eve.
And then Delta flight 8865 landed.
“You’ve seen the old movies of when The Beatles landed at JFK in 1964, and they’re walking down the jetway and there’s all these crazed fans to greet them?” Murphy said. “I swear that’s what it looked like, a thousand people gat hered and screaming and chanting and reaching out for the players.”
By now you’ve surely seen dozens of the amateur videos chronicling the key play of this wonderful football parable, when on fourth-and-12, late, Cincinnati’s Andy Dalton threw a 49-yard touchdown pass to Tyler Boyd, pushing the Ravens to the brink of elimination on one of the most improbable plays you’ll ever see.
Bills fans lined up on Murphy’s call-in show Tuesday to detail exactly where they were when this blessed event happened. Those who didn’t get through called other friends. I have a buddy — to preserve his dignity, I’ll call him Cookie Smerlas — who so tortures himself during Bills games that he was convinced, even as Boyd crossed the goal line with 44 seconds left, that the Ravens would still win. He turned the TV off. He kept the radio off as he drove to a New Year’s Eve party.
It was only when he reached his neighbor’s house that the relentless joy inside informed him his Bills really were heading to Jacksonville.
Steve Tasker, one of the most popular Bills of all-time, worked the Colts-Texans game for CBS Sunday in Indianapolis. He was boarding his connecting flight in Charlotte, N.C., back home when he heard the pilot exclaim: “Holy cow, the Bengals won!”
“Yo u ’d better ma k e that announcement to the plane,” Tasker told him. The pilot did. And the Buffalo-bound plane shook with the resulting glee.
“Being a fan can suck,” my friend Cookies aid ,“until it doesn’t, you know?”
Of course you know. We all do. It’s why so many of us can relate to the bliss that continues to envelop Buffalo, where the high temperature on Thursday will be 4 degrees. One of the truly amazing elements of this is how so many Bills fans reacted: Through Wednesday, close to 5,000 of them donated more than $170,000 to the Andy & Jordan Dalton Foundation that provides support for ill children and their families in Cincinnati and Fort Worth, Texas (where Dalton played in college, at TCU).
Many of those donations arriving $17 at a time — to represent the 17-year playoff dry spell that Dalton made disappear with one throw.
“You know, a lot of times, all people see of Bills fans are a couple of drunken idiots in parking lots,” Murphy said. “But this tells you what most of them are like. This tells you what this city is like, honestly. A city that cares this much.”
Enough to make pro athletes cry. Murphy did remember one other time he saw the outer veneer fail Bills players. That was 17 years ago, and it was in Nashville — in the aftermath of the 22-16 loss forever known as the Music City Miracle, the last time the Bills participated in a playoff game.
“This time,” Murphy said, laughing, “was better.”