The Luck of the Draw
“Luck” is still one of the ingredients of life. It helped a couple of times when I “dodged a
bullet” in Vietnam. I have also attributed
it to some of the good fortune I have had along the road of life. Hard work, diligence, skill,
determination—they all are important and necessary. But sometimes you also need “luck.”
At the end of what may have been the most exciting football
game I have ever witnessed—bad luck is what largely resulted in the Bill’s loss
to the Chiefs in the recent NFL play-offs.
There were a lot of “Monday morning quarterback” comments on what the
Bills could or should have done differently, but the biggest difference was
that, at the end of regulation time, Josh Allen called “tails” instead of “heads” on the coin toss to
determine the first possession in overtime.
Kansas City and Patrick Mahomes got the ball—and the rest is history.
Had Allen called “heads,” the way the Buffalo Bills offense
was playing— I think they would have gone down the field and won the game.
It was that kind of game.
At the end, it didn’t seem like the defenses for either team were even
on the field. Allen took the Bills down
the field with only about two minutes left in regulation time to score a
touchdown and take the lead. Mahomes
took the Chief’s down the field with only 13 seconds left and scored a field
goal to tie the game. Tell me, have you ever
seen anything like this in your life?!
It has been interesting for me to see how “existential”
Bills’ football has become in our family.
Part of it is due to the fact that we choose one Bills home game each
year as a gathering spot for a family get-together. Part of it may also be due to the fact that
here in the “back-water” of Western New York, in the fall and winter—we need
the stimulation of watching the Buffalo Bills.
And “boy!” have they been fun to watch this year!
In retrospect, I don’t think—maybe until now—we have ever
realized how tough it was for those Bills in the 1990’s to make four trips to
the Super Bowl. To play through a
grueling season of 16 or 17 games and claw your way to the top of a division,
then conference title, and then to finally get to the Super Bowl… is an almost
insurmountable task.
During one of those Super Bowl runs, Jim Kelly related that
Coach Marv Levy (a World War II veteran) once posed the question to the team in
the locker room during an away game— “Do you know why Hitler lost World War
II?” Dumbfounded, the players looked at
each other, then Levy gave the answer— “Because he couldn’t win on the
road!” The team left the locker room,
went out on the field and won that game.
It is hard to win “on the road,” and it was sad to see the
Bills lose to the Chiefs. But I don’t think the Bills lost any fans that
night. Next year is coming and “hope
springs eternal from the human breast.”
Maybe next time, the play-off game will be in our stadium, the coin toss
will go our way and we will win—the“luck
of the draw!”
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