House Bills

The Wound

Four consecutive winters at the end of the 1990s, this house reached the last field of the year. Four times it lost. No other house in the realm has ever been that good for that long and come away with nothing, and Buffalo has spent thirty years being told this is a personality trait rather than bad luck.

Then it kept happening in new ways. A kick that went wide in 1991. Thirteen seconds in Kansas City in January 2022 — enough time, it turned out, to lose a game they had already won.

They have taken the AFC East repeatedly and it has never once been the thing they wanted.

The Lord

Josh Allen. Enormous, joyful, and capable of things no one else in the realm attempts. He has been the best reason to watch football for six years running and it has not been enough, which is not a sentence about him. It is a sentence about how narrow the last door is.

The Knights

• D.J. Moore — bought from Chicago this spring, the answer to a question Buffalo has been asked in every postseason: who else?

Ancient Grudges

• House Chiefs. The wall. Buffalo has run at it in January over and over, and the wall has always been standing afterward.
• House Patriots. Two decades of finishing second in their own division to the same house. The memory has not faded so much as calcified.

What Changed This Spring

They traded for D.J. Moore and paid Bradley Chubb $43.5 million. Both of those are the same decision: this house has stopped building and started spending, because the lord is twenty-nine and the door is closing.

Prophecy

That the wall is finally down. It has been down before.