I’ve been rewatching Psych, a criminally underrated TV show following the hilarious antics of the immature and hyper-observant Shawn Spencer who masquerades as a psychic detective.
The season 3 episode titled “Tuesday the 17th” sees Shawn and his best friend, Gus, return to a camp they visited as kids. The camp is being reopened after twenty years by a childhood friend. The new owner wants to capitalize on the camp’s murky reputation — a repairman was electrocuted in the swimming pool and caused the camp to close — by creating a camp where people pay to become the subjects of a terrifying “whodunit” mystery.
During the episode, the camp’s mystique becomes reality, as one of the camp counselors, Clive, for-real murders two other counselors. In his cliché, evil villain speech, we learn the man who died at the camp twenty years prior was his father. Clive sought revenge on everyone who was apart of the camp’s reopening, as he saw the “murder camp” as making a mockery of his father.
I am Clive. My cousins of the Can’t Lose Hughes fam are Clive. All of the millennials and Gen Zs representing the Bills Mafia are Clive.
You see, a part of our parents and grandparents also died twenty-plus years ago. The Bills teams of the early 1990s broke the souls of the last generation of Bills fans. Four straight Super Bowl losses do a number on the psyche of a person, in the kind of way that probably requires therapy. ESPN’s 30 for 30 made an entire documentary about it.
Here we are a little more than twenty years later and hope, like Camp Tikihama, has returned to Buffalo. Well, there has always been hope — Bills Mafia is a passionately loyal bunch — but it has never been substantiated by a legitimately great team since the K-Gun era.
The franchise’s reputation, long marred in irrelevance and ignominy, has been restored by Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane. Offseason acquisition Stefon Diggs is “Buffalo’s Miracle Man”. The Bills have the most under-appreciated DB room in the league, anchored by Tre’Davious White, Micah Hyde, Jordan Poyer, and Saturday night’s hero Taron Johnson.
Most importantly, and in defiance of his many doubters, including yours truly: Josh Allen is the prince who was promised.
Left tackle Dion Dawkins may be the least recognizable leader in the Bills locker room, at least nationally. But he’s a prominent figure in the 716. He, too, is Clive.
“Nah….. we’ve been “cute.” We’ve been those lovable losers. We’ve been that blue-collar city, grinding hard, but ultimately settling for a moral victory. We’ve been Little Brother. And you know what??
We’re so damn sick of it.”
A Letter to Bills Mafia, Pt. II — The Players’ Tribune
The Bills and the Bills Mafia are tired of everyone making their jokes about losing four straight Super Bowls. Of the Music City Miracle cracks. Of the Buffalo wings digs.
We want to win and we want to take down everyone who laughed at our misery. This is about so much more than games on a football field. Come on, son. This is personal.
Those wounds of the ’90s extended beyond the four Super Bowl defeats. O.J. Simpson was a Bills legend back in the 1970s and evolved into a nationally beloved figure. He was the first player to rush for 2,000 yards in a season (and he did it in only fourteen games, as my dad will never pass up a chance to point out).
Mere months after the fourth Super Bowl appearance, Simpson became the most famous murder suspect in American. The childhood hero of my dad, his brothers and sister, and nearly every Baby Boomer in Buffalo was outed as a homicidal maniac.
The entirety of the Bills franchise to that point could be summarized in just two words: murderer and loser. In the twenty-five years since only one word would need to be added: irrelevant.
All of that pain could be excised with two more victories. But those victories will not come easily. One juggernaut awaits this Sunday in Kansas City and another would assuredly be waiting on February 7th. Furthermore, the two men potentially standing in their path could be the two men who have caused the Bills more agony than any other in the twenty-first century.
Up first is Patrick Mahomes, whom the Bills essentially handed to Kansas City via a draft-day trade in 2017. While the Bills ultimately added two Pro Bowlers in Tre White and Tremaine Edmunds in the trade, Mahomes has accomplished more in his young career than any Bill literally ever has. While Allen was floundering aimlessly during his first two seasons as a starter, Mahomes shattered records, won an MVP, and took home a Super Bowl trophy.
One year ago, I wrote “I hold Allen to a very high standard, arguably too high…. In passing on Mahomes, [Deshaun] Watson, and [Lamar] Jackson in favor of Allen, the Bills organization must have believed Allen the best prospect of the group.” It goes without saying, but I believed that to be a catastrophic mistake for the Bills franchise.
Defeating Mahomes and the Chiefs would prove the Bills’ decision-making process to be not entirely foolish and create a bona fide rivalry between the young star quarterbacks. (It would also likely vanquish some personal demons of mine.)
The second man, pending the result of the NFC Championship Game, could be Tom Brady.
Goddammit. Just writing those words makes me shiver.
The former Patriots quarterback abused Western New York for two decades before departing for Tampa Bay and the NFC. According to a Wikipedia page ironically titled “Bills-Patriots rivalry”, Brady played 35 games against the Bills during his Patriots tenure; he won an astonishing 32 of them and threw 68 touchdowns.
Brady’s exit from New England was supposed to signal a new beginning. We thought he was retiring to the tropical Florida climate, like every other old person with money from the Northeast.
For the Bills to finally return to relevance, win the AFC East, and reach a Super Bowl, only to see Tom fucking Brady waiting for them… (like Pluto) that’s pretty messed up, right?
There’s an infinite number of quotes and proverbs that say the best revenge is, essentially, no revenge. I guess those aren’t entirely inaccurate.
The same way killing his fellow camp counselors was never going to bring Clive’s father back, defeating Mahomes and Brady won’t erase a quarter-century’s worth of suffering. But damn would it be as sweet as pineapple.
Buffalo can already taste the champagne. We’ve drank our Tim Hortons coffee, the folding tables have been set up and the bleu cheese is fully stocked. You know that’s right.
Are we getting ahead of ourselves? Perhaps. But fuck it. We’ve been preparing for this all our lives, biding our time for this exact moment. I guess we’ll just have to… wait for iiiiiit.