The one thing everybody knows about the Buffalo Bills is that they lost four Super Bowls in a row, from 1990–93. The most famous loss came after a missed field goal by Scott Norwood against the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXV. It was so traumatizing to Bills fans that, seven years later, Buffalo native Vincent Gallo made a movie called Buffalo ’66 about a man who dedicates his life to murdering a kicker named “Scott Wood” who missed a field goal to cost the Buffalo Bills the Super Bowl. What people tend to forget is what happened with the Bills over the next 25 years: Nothing.

From 1994 (the year of Bills’ last Super Bowl loss) to 2018 (the year they drafted Josh Allen, their All-Pro quarterback who is going to win the MVP this year and has been justifiably anointed as the franchise and region’s savior), the Bills won exactly one (1) playoff game, in 1995, before losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers the next week. Then the Bills went 25 years, exactly 9,149 days, without winning another. Whenever Bills fans are discussed, it’s always in the context of those four Super Bowl losses. But Bills fans watched their team be miserable for 25 years after that. The Bills’ pain was so profound for 20 years that losing four straight Super Bowls — basically the worst thing that can happen to a fan base — was as good as it got.

Then Josh Allen — a future Hall of Famer, a transcendent player, the sort of quarterback every fan base dreams of — arrived. And somehow it has gotten worse.

On Sunday night, the Bills’ misery reached an audaciously torturous new level, and the only way I suspect Bills fans could make it through it was by telling themselves that they saw it coming all along —........

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