Sports, Life, and Disappointment

It seemed as if it was meant to be.

On Sunday, the Buffalo Bills, who had been Super Bowl favorites since the start of training camp, took the field for a divisional playoff game against the Cincinnati Bengals, who were coming off a surprising Super Bowl appearance from the year before.

The Bills, the team infamous for losing four consecutive Super Bowls, were on the cusp of winning their first Super Bowl, and dedicating it to fallen teammate Damar Hamlin, still recovering from his shocking cardiac arrest suffered on the field in Cincinnati three weeks earlier.  On top of that, it was snowing in Buffalo, a familiar sight for a Bills playoff game.  What could wrong for the Bills?

Everything.

Quarterback Josh Allen and the Bills offense looked lifeless, while the defense could not stop or even slow Joe Burrow and the Bengals.  Cincinnati quickly went up 14-0 and never looked back, winning 27-10.  The Bills run of destiny was over too soon.  Buffalo didn’t play nearly as well against the Bengals as the Ravens did the week before with their backup quarterback.

There is no joy in Buffalo, the mighty Bills have struck out.

The Bills’ heartbreaking defeat had me questioning if victory is truly more noble that defeat, because, frankly, I don’t understand why.  

In truth, those teams in sports defined more by failure than success are the teams with the most humanity embedded within them.

Indeed, this truism has held up with legions of sports fans.  Before they won the World Series in 2016, the Chicago Cubs’ legacy of futility and century-plus without a World Series championship endeared them to millions of neutral fans.  Whenever they found themselves on the verge of breaking through, fate always seemed to stand up to them, perhaps never more acutely than in 2003 when a fan named Steve Bartman reached for a catchable foul ball with the Cubs just five outs away from reaching the World Series.  The Cubs defined losing, which earned them many fans, and all their games were televised nationally for decades.

The Bills are one the NFL’s most tortured franchises, with a loyal fan base that suffered through the aforementioned four Super Bowl defeats, the first of which was capped off with a game-winning field goal missed wide right by kicker Scott Norwood. Buffalo has also suffered other painful playoff losses, such as the Music City Miracle against the Titans, and being thirteen seconds away from beating the Chiefs in last year’s playoffs.  The most iconic player in team history is a notorious murderer.  The city of Buffalo itself has been rocked by several severe blizzards and a racist mass shooting in the past year.  Watching the Bills self-immolate against Cincinnati was akin to seeing a poor man executed for a crime he didn’t commit.  A complete miscarriage of justice.  Alas, that’s the way life works sometimes.  The honest are punished, while the corrupt triumph.

Sports, and especially those teams that never win, are in a small way a reflection of ourselves.  Many, if not all of us, have bills to pay (not the Buffalo Bills), a frustrating job, an unhappy relationship.  The grand aspirations we once had are cruelly cast aside by reality.  The unpleasant experiences we face somehow make us more human, leading us to understand that life will let us down far more often than not.  Would life be as meaningful without the pitfalls we endure?

Ultimately, the biggest question is this: Why are we so drawn to sports?  Why should we continue to follow our teams, when they will very likely break our hearts yet again?

We come back to our teams because they offer us a certain intangible quality: hope.  Hope is the lifeblood that keeps us going, gives us reason to believe.  When the team we love struggles, we can still hope they will turn it around one day.  But understand that the successes and failures of your team are in no way a reflection of our own successes and failures.  Still, we can hope our failed team can rise up to one day become a winner.  As Tim Robbins opined in The Shawshank Redemption: