With the preseason opener coming Friday night and the regular season opener exactly one month away, we’re gathered at the starting line of the most anticipated Buffalo Bills season since the Super Bowl teams of the early '90s.
Expectations are sky-high, and they should be.
The 2020 Bills broke through in a massive way, moving from being a playoff team to a bonafide Super Bowl contender. They earned high praise nationally, as well as locally, and have a quarterback who is now among the most highly paid players in the history of the National Football League. It’s generally agreed that there was nothing fluky about the Bills, nor Josh Allen’s arrival on the national stage.
Allen and the team have earned their way to favorite status. The ride they took their fans on last season should prove to be unforgettable, and that’s definitely awesome.
I’m not here to tell you to forget about it. That would be ridiculous. What I would like to try to do is encourage you to enjoy the coming season without being entirely focused on seeing the Bills beat the Kansas City Chiefs, or some other team in January.
It’ll be challenging.
Expectations are good to have. Fans should have high expectations for the 2021 Bills. I have them, too. But teams don’t get to just pick up where they left off the season before. It may be pretty "coach-speak-y," but Sean McDermott is correct when he said last January that you have to start all over each season.
I learned this lesson myself, the hard way, through the 2006-07 Buffalo Sabres.
Fresh off an invigorating run to the Eastern Conference Final in the spring of 2006, the Sabres started the following season by winning their first 10 games and never really slowed down. They won the Presidents' Trophy with the most points in the NHL regular season.
It should have been one of my favorite hockey seasons ever, but I didn’t really enjoy it that much. You know why?
Because I pretty much treated that amazingly entertaining season as a formality. I spent the entire season thinking about how the Sabres would match up with the Anaheim Ducks, who had lost in the Western Conference Final the previous spring.
Oh, I watched every game, but I also probably watched 30 Ducks games too. Nothing wrong with that, of course, I love watching hockey. But my obsession with an eventual opponent in the Stanley Cup Final kept me from investing in, and really enjoying a truly historic Sabres season.
Need I remind you, that Sabres team did not get to pick up where they left off the previous spring. They lost in the same round as the year before.
It wasn’t until weeks later that I realized my disappointment about the loss to the Ottawa Senators was about more than just the result. I was crushed that I’d failed to embrace the season-long ride, and in it’s place had spent all my time fixated on a matchup that never ended up happening.
This made me feel like kind of a chump.
So this time around, no assumptions.
I’ll worry about how the Bills match up with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Green Bay Packers or Los Angeles Rams when the time comes. Seeing the Chiefs in October will be tasty, of course, but I’ll be making an effort to not look too far down the road.
The Bills have earned their place as a contender and their fans should enjoy having high expectations. Just don’t let it make you take the regular season games for granted.
If you do, you might miss out on something really special.
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