Bills’ renaissance provides hope for Giants, Jets’ turnarounds

St. John's last chance starts now

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BUFFALO — Things are bad in New York City when it comes to professional football. They are very bad. They are glum, and they are grisly, and sometimes it can seem as if the darkness is destined to last forever. 

I have a news bulletin for you: 

It doesn’t have to last forever. 

I have spent the past few days in downtown Buffalo, and I can state this with absolute certainty: This is the happiest place in the NFL. This is the most optimistic place in the NFL right now. It may go against civic tradition to be so buoyant — after all, after the Bills blew their AFC playoff game with Kansas City a few months ago the locals had to sift through a deep pile of candidates to determine where that game stood on the list of sporting heartbreaks. 

But that was a few months ago. This is now. And it’s not just that the rest of the NFL seems to believe that the Bills are the champions-in-waiting. The locals are allowing themselves to buy in, too. 

“I know how dangerous that is,” a Bills fan named Paul Kuchalski said Thursday afternoon at KeyBank Center. He was wearing a Richmond sweatshirt, but a Bills ballcap — “I wear something with a Bills logo just about every day,” he explained — and was happily willing to blast holes through the caution that usually pervades such things. 

“I look at it this way: What else can sports do to hurt us?” he said, referring to bad beats Buffalo teams have suffered. “We’ve lived through Scott Norwood. We lived through No Goal. We lived through the Music City Miracle. We lived through 13 Seconds. So if your plan was to work the reverse jinx and hope things work out that way … well, it hasn’t worked. So why not just embrace what we have.” 

Bills fans
The Bills currently have the most optimistic fans in the NFL.
The Post-Standard /Landov

And good things keep happening for the Bills. Von Miller, freshly crowned a champion, left the warm embrace — and just general warmth — of Los Angeles this week because he wanted to come to Buffalo. The list of affluent people with choices who would pick Buffalo over L.A. is probably short — maybe the late Tim Russert would’ve done it. But Miller just did. 

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