Pitarresi: Sick loss for the Bills

I am very, very sick right now.

 

Sick to death about the Buffalo Bills losing to the New England Patriots tonight.

 

Maybe I would have felt better if the Bills had just gotten blown out, instead of having blown a 24-13 lead in the last couple of minutes. No, not really. A one-sided loss would have been pretty depressing, a probable indicator of another long, lost season. I don’t know that a close loss is much more comforting, but at least they were in the ballgame against one of the NFL’s premier teams, piloted again by one of the great quarterbacks of all time.

 

Which, now that I think on it again, does make it worse. You’ve battled like crazy all game, you score a touchdown that appears to put things on ice, then you give up a long drive for a score, and then you fumble the kickoff. Oh, boy, do I feel badly for Leodis McKelvin, who had the ball stripped from his arms. Get down on the ground? Yeah, sure, but I think he was trying to. The Patriots held him up, that left him vulnerable, and there goes ball.

 

So now, you give it to Tom Brady 30 yards from victory with two minutes to play. There is no such thing as a lock, but that is as close as you can get. Game over. I’m not sure there ever has been a quarterback better at surgical last ditch drives than Brady. Remember Super Bowl XXXXII? The Giants didn’t beat Brady. He rolled right down the field on the Patriots’ last drive and put them ahead. Then David Tyree came up with the catch of the century, and the rest is history.

 

  I’m a native Western New Yorker and I love the Bills, but I’ve written here before that I try not to invest a tremendous amount of emotion in the team. It tends to wear me down. Right now, though, I see I was talking – or rather writing – through my hat. I did invest at least a little emotion in the Bills, and now I am, as I say, very, very sick.