Buffalo Bills start what could be historic season on Thursday

For the Buffalo Bills, anything less than their first Super Bowl title would need to be considered a failure in the 2022 NFL season.

Thirteen seconds. A rallying cry for all time in Buffalo.

This year,  the Buffalo Bills will hear the two words repeatedly. They’ll hear them from each other as motivation. They’ll hear them as jeers come Week 6 when they visit the Kansas City Chiefs and Arrowhead Stadium, birthplace of the moment. They will certainly hear them in the postseason should they arrive there, trying to destroy nightmares.

For the Bills, the 2022 season is both about taking the weeks as they come but also understanding the importance each brings. Last year, it was Buffalo losing 9-6 to the lowly, Urban Meyer-led Jacksonville Jaguars that cost it home-field advantage in the playoffs. This time around, no such slips can occur.

In Buffalo, fans have been waiting since 1965 for another championship, when the Bills were finishing off a second consecutive American Football League title. Since, they famously reached four straight Super Bowls from 1990-93, losing each.

This group has a legitimate chance not to erase, but to curtail those demons. They can give Buffalo its first professional championship in almost 60 years. It can ease the heartache of a region which knows little else.

Yet that can’t happen overnight. It takes a season. A season which begins on primetime come Thursday night against the Los Angeles Rams. For quarterback Josh Allen, the game is an opportunity, via his comments from NFL.com:

“Going to play the defending Super Bowl champs and watching them raise their banner, that’ll be an interesting feeling for sure. And I’ve talked to a few people who have played and coached in this game before, and just really the unanimous thing that they were talking about was it feels like playoff atmosphere. So, we got to understand that going in, not get too high, not get too low. Understand the flow of the game and just try to put our best foot forward.”

For Buffalo, it all starts on Thursday night where the last Super Bowl was played. Eventually, the weather will grow colder and the stakes will get bigger, and then the Bills will have their chance for redemption.

Until then, Buffalo has to win once and then once more, trying to give someone else the pain it has dealt with far too often.

This year, could be the Bills’ year. It starts Thursday.