Just a couple hundred feet away from the Buffalo Bills’ new home lies the rubble of the old one, which feels almost a little too perfect.
Highmark Stadium opened Thursday night as a monument to what the Bills hope comes next, a shiny new building filled with all the modern amenities and general new-stadium smell that a couple billion dollars can buy. And then, right across the street, there is the place that contains almost everything Buffalo has spent the last half-century trying to outrun, slowly being reduced to concrete and twisted metal while the Bills start over again beside it.
The old stadium was where Bills fans learned, repeatedly and with almost comical thoroughness, that hope is a dangerous thing.
It started in 1973, and there were plenty of good memories mixed in with the bad. The Bills had some good seasons in the early-to-mid ’70s that ended in failure, while the latter years of that decade and much of the next were filled with so much despair that simply becoming relevant again would have qualified as progress. Then the hope returned in 1988, when Buffalo finally found its footing once more and began building toward something that felt considerably bigger.
That streak of excellence brought expectations, though, which ultimately strung along more sadness and despair alongside it. From 1990-93, the Bills made the Super Bowl four years in a row, first losing 20-19 to the New York Giants before falling to Washington the following season. Back-to-back failures against the Cowboys followed, completing what became known as the Four Falls of Buffalo and leaving behind a particularly cruel legacy: one of the greatest teams of its era, remembered as much for the four games it lost as all the ones it won.
Sports can be a little cruel like that.
In the years since the early ’90s, the Bills have desperately been looking for one more shot. A fifth chance to claim greatness. Season after season passed without it, and eventually Buffalo went from being the team that could not win the Super Bowl to being a team that would quite like to participate in the playoffs again. The 21st century was particularly unkind, as the Bills secured just one winning record over the first 13 years of the millennium.