BuffaloRanger
06-17-2005, 01:41 PM
We have discussed what the Bills mean to Buffalo and it's fans. How they should never leave. We have questioned why they are so important to us, afterall they are just a bunch of guys playing for money.
So I have taken the following from a MICHAEL ELLIOTT essay in the 20 June 05 Time magazine. It was about the author's love of the Liverpool Soccer team. These words apply to any fan, so I have added my own Bills references. Again this is just part of the essay and not my words. (I know LifetimeBillsFan will appreciate this.)
Apart from the big, obvious things--love, death, (no children yet) --most of the really walloping emotional highs and lows of my life have involved watching the Bills (and Sabres). There was the ecstasy of being in the crowd when the Bills crushed the Raiders in the 91 AFC Championship game 51-3, being there when the Bills staged the greatest comeback in NFL history, watching them make it to 4 consecutive SuperBowls - only to watch them lose all four. The pain of that Titans playoff game. The Sabres improbable run to the Stanley Cup only to be cheated at the end. Through long experience, my family has come to know that their chances of having a vaguely pleasant son/husband depended largely on how the Bills fared on any given Sunday. I was clinically depressed for 4 days after the Bills lost to the Steelers this year. But what on earth makes this--let's admit it--pretty unsophisticated devotion to the fortunes of men I've never met so powerful?
Fandom--the obsessional identification with a sports team--is universal. We fans like to describe our passion in religious terms, as if the places our heroes play were secular cathedrals. It's easy to see why. When you truly, deeply love a sports team, you give yourself up to something bigger than yourself, not just because your individuality is rendered insignificant in the mass of the crowd but also because being a fan involves faith. No matter what its current form may be, your team is worthy of blind devotion. Belief is all.
For me, following one football team has been the connective tissue of my life. I left Buffalo to go to college and have not lived there since because of my job in the military, though now living 3 hours away has afforded me the opportunity to be a season ticket holder. Wandering around the world, living in 8 different cities on three continents, my passion was the thing that gave me a sense of what home meant. Being a fan became a fixed point, wherever I lived. It was--it is--one of the two or three things that I think of as making me, well, me.
But fandom does more than defeat distance and geography. It acts as a time machine. There is only one thing I have done consistently for nearly 25 years years, and that is support the Bills (and Sabres). To be a fan is a blessing, for it connects you as nothing else can to childhood, and to everything and everyone that marked your life between your time as a child and the present.
What does being a fan mean? It means you'll always have somone to throw your head back and shout with.
I think this pretty much sums it up perfectly.
So I have taken the following from a MICHAEL ELLIOTT essay in the 20 June 05 Time magazine. It was about the author's love of the Liverpool Soccer team. These words apply to any fan, so I have added my own Bills references. Again this is just part of the essay and not my words. (I know LifetimeBillsFan will appreciate this.)
Apart from the big, obvious things--love, death, (no children yet) --most of the really walloping emotional highs and lows of my life have involved watching the Bills (and Sabres). There was the ecstasy of being in the crowd when the Bills crushed the Raiders in the 91 AFC Championship game 51-3, being there when the Bills staged the greatest comeback in NFL history, watching them make it to 4 consecutive SuperBowls - only to watch them lose all four. The pain of that Titans playoff game. The Sabres improbable run to the Stanley Cup only to be cheated at the end. Through long experience, my family has come to know that their chances of having a vaguely pleasant son/husband depended largely on how the Bills fared on any given Sunday. I was clinically depressed for 4 days after the Bills lost to the Steelers this year. But what on earth makes this--let's admit it--pretty unsophisticated devotion to the fortunes of men I've never met so powerful?
Fandom--the obsessional identification with a sports team--is universal. We fans like to describe our passion in religious terms, as if the places our heroes play were secular cathedrals. It's easy to see why. When you truly, deeply love a sports team, you give yourself up to something bigger than yourself, not just because your individuality is rendered insignificant in the mass of the crowd but also because being a fan involves faith. No matter what its current form may be, your team is worthy of blind devotion. Belief is all.
For me, following one football team has been the connective tissue of my life. I left Buffalo to go to college and have not lived there since because of my job in the military, though now living 3 hours away has afforded me the opportunity to be a season ticket holder. Wandering around the world, living in 8 different cities on three continents, my passion was the thing that gave me a sense of what home meant. Being a fan became a fixed point, wherever I lived. It was--it is--one of the two or three things that I think of as making me, well, me.
But fandom does more than defeat distance and geography. It acts as a time machine. There is only one thing I have done consistently for nearly 25 years years, and that is support the Bills (and Sabres). To be a fan is a blessing, for it connects you as nothing else can to childhood, and to everything and everyone that marked your life between your time as a child and the present.
What does being a fan mean? It means you'll always have somone to throw your head back and shout with.
I think this pretty much sums it up perfectly.