Parenting Lessons From the 1990s Kids Who Grew Up Bills Fans

Stephen Soroka was 10 years old in January 1991 when the Buffalo Bills made their first Super Bowl appearance. He lived in East Aurora, N.Y., about a 20-minute drive from Buffalo. Everyone he knew was caught up in the excitement of what seemed like a certain championship.

The Bills had gone 13-3 in the regular season and steamrollered the Dolphins and Raiders in the playoffs. On Super Bowl Sunday, Soroka’s father held a party, borrowing a big TV from his parents, and putting his family’s small TV in the kitchen “so that if someone had to run to the kitchen for some food, they could still watch the game.”

The euphoria that had built in the weeks before the game collapsed in an instant.

The Bills were trailing the Giants by 20-19 late in the fourth quarter, when Buffalo quarterback Jim Kelly drove the team to within field goal range. With eight seconds left, kicker Scott Norwood lined up a 47-yard attempt and missed — wide right.

“I remember falling down and crying,” Soroka said.

Benny the Butcher, the prominent Buffalo rapper who was born Jeremie Pennick, was also a young boy who watched that Super Bowl at a family party. But his mother was so upset when the Bills lost that, he said, “we just up and left.”

“My mom didn’t say goodbye to nobody,” he continued. “She grabbed my hand and walked so fast I could hardly keep up.”

Buffalo made it to Super Bowls the next three seasons and lost each of those, too. While none of the later defeats had the same sting as the first, they left an indelible imprint on young fans like Soroka and Pennick. For kids in the 1990s, having their hearts broken by the Bills was part of growing up.

Now that they’re adults, that generation of fans feels a familiar set of expectations setting in. The Bills, who won the A.F.C. East with a 13-3 record, have been favored all season to win the Super Bowl behind quarterback Josh Allen, a candidate for the Most Valuable Player Award. The team’s storybook kickoff return to open its first game after Damar Hamlin’s collapse and its rally to beat the Dolphins in the wild-card round have again built anticipation for what the Bills might achieve.

The Bills’ success has also been a source of solace and joy for the region during a difficult year. Last May, a gunman killed 10 Black people in a racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket; two horrific snowstorms caused more than 40 deaths this winter; Hamlin, a Bills safety, went into cardiac arrest during a Jan. 2 game in Cincinnati, and his recovery has turned the games since into a communal catharsis for the team’s fans. “The Bills,” says Sean Kirst, a columnist for The Buffalo News, “bind this community together, in good times and bad.”

Many of those young fans from the 1990s have their own children now, and it got me wondering: What had the repeated heartbreak of Bills fandom taught them about football? About life? What of those lessons are they passing on?

So many of the rituals are the same today as they were then. Pennick remembers that his elementary school encouraged kids to wear Bills gear on the Fridays before games — just like Buffalo schools are doing now.

More on Damar Hamlin’s Collapse

• In His Hometown: As the news about Damar Hamlin’s recovery has become more hopeful, anguish has turned to “happy tears” in the tight-knit Pennsylvania borough where he grew up.
• Emergency Response: When Hamlin’s heart stopped, medical personnel could be heard making clear the severity of his condition and the efforts to keep him alive. Listen to the audio.
• Who Told Players to Warm Up? N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell didn’t say who, if anyone, ordered players back on the field after Hamlin collapsed. The decision has sparked criticism from the players’ union.

Shola Clark, who was 7 in 1991, recalls that her family would always have a pregame party at home; it was like tailgating without the tailgate. Her grandfather, Billie Banks, would always make a delicious gumbo at a relative’s home, she said. These days are similar: Fans all over the Buffalo area gather with friends and family to eat, drink and root for the Bills.

Clark, a dispatcher for the Buffalo Fire Department, said that during the worst of the snowstorm on Christmas Eve, the volume of emergency calls dropped during the three hours the Bills played the Chicago Bears.

Glenn MacBlane, a teenager in 1991, used to cut out newspaper photos of players like Kelly and running back Thurman Thomas and paste them in a scrapbook. His younger sister Amanda remembers that for a seventh-grade art project she drew a portrait of Andre Reed, the team’s star receiver. These days, kids all over the Buffalo area are clipping pictures of Allen, drawing portraits of the star receiver Stefon Diggs, and crafting posters in support of Hamlin.

“They were your team,” says Zach Calleri, who was 8 in 1991. “You never walked away from the team or left them for a different team that might be better at the time.”

There is something else important about the relationship between the Bills and the Bills Mafia, as their fan base is now called. “This is a segregated city,” said Clark, whose family owns the city’s Black newspaper, The Challenger Community News. But, she added, “when you’re in that stadium, race doesn’t matter. Everybody’s showing love. Everybody’s high-fiving.”

When I asked millennial Bills fans what comfort they got after that first Super Bowl loss, all remembered that the city held a big rally for the team when it flew back to Buffalo from Florida.

Norwood, the dejected kicker, was among those who addressed the crowd. In other cities, bigger cities, he might have been booed. But in Buffalo that day he was cheered. And that became a kind of lesson in itself.

“One of the really heartwarming things about that Super Bowl, as painful as it was, was the way Scott Norwood was accepted by the community and never shunned,” said Amanda MacBlane, who remains fiercely loyal to the Bills even though she and her family now live in Manhattan.

The message that came through was that you didn’t just root for the Bills — you rallied around them when times were tough. That may help explain why Kelly, who vowed never to play for the Bills when he was first drafted, still lives in the Buffalo area.

Another lesson, of course, is that no matter how devastating a loss might be, life goes on. The millennial parents I spoke to all felt that was something they had to learn on their own.

Those first few days of school after the Super Bowl, they said, teachers were as sad and speechless as they were. Some parents needed weeks to get over the game. “The only people I remember talking to were other kids,” said Andy Schultz, another East Aurora, N.Y. native. “We would talk about how downtrodden we were.” In its full-on embrace of the Bills that season, Buffalo had forgotten that a game is just a game.

Three decades later, those parents I spoke to are determined not to make the same mistake with their own children.

Schultz, who has three boys who range in age from 4 to 11, recalls the brutal loss against Kansas City in a divisional-round playoff game last season. The lead changed three times in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter, including when Allen threw a go-ahead touchdown pass with just 13 seconds left. Victory seemed assured — until Patrick Mahomes led Kansas City into field-goal range and Harrison Butker drilled a game-tying 49-yard kick as regulation expired. Kansas City then won it in overtime.

“It was just this roller coaster of emotion,” Schultz said. “You can’t help but get caught up in it. But then when it’s over, you have to step back and remind your kids that this is a game. We’re here to have fun. Nobody’s throwing anything at the TV or anything like that.”

When Hamlin collapsed during a Jan. 2 game against the Bengals, Amanda MacBlane was watching at home with her children. She has talked to them about brain injuries and won’t let them play tackle, but the family hasn’t quite reconciled its love for football with its brutality.

“We were talking over the next few days about how many heroes there were in this story,” she said. “The Bills and Bengals throwing aside the competition in the name of the health of another player. The first responders who kept Damar alive. All the many people came together to take care of each other.”

She also told me that her read from talking to Bills fans nonstop over the past few weeks was that if the team were to lose in the playoffs, people would take it much more in stride because Hamlin’s injury had brought home what really matters.

I spoke to Calleri in mid-November, days after the Bills had lost a sloppy game to the Minnesota Vikings, 33-30, in overtime.

“There’s a lot of hype around us this year,” he said. It’s easy to let that take you over, but then there are games like Sunday’s. After it was over, he told his 8-year-old son, Elwood, “Yeah, I really wish we had won today but it’s OK. You’re not going to win every game, right? You accept it and move forward.”

Soroka’s three children can’t help but remind him of himself when he was their age. His two boys, Henry, 9, and James, 4, wanted to be Bills players for Halloween, which didn’t require much since they already had all the gear. Whenever the Bills score a touchdown his oldest child, 11-year-old Ella, breaks into the team’s “shout song.” (Sung to the original Isley Brothers melody, it begins, “The Bills make me want to shout/Kick your heels up and shout…”) James has already learned that Bills fans don’t root for Tom Brady or Mahomes.

Of all the parents I talked to, Soroka is the one who still ached over that Super Bowl loss. “We were the better team that year, and sometimes I just find myself thinking, ‘What if we had won that year? What would that momentum have been like for the next three years?’ I know I can’t think like that because it takes me to a dark place. There’s nothing I can do about the past, but every once in a while, I’ll catch myself going there.”

After that Kansas City loss last postseason, Soroka’s son Henry started crying, and tried to go to his room. Soroka stopped him. “He came back to the living room, and we talked.”

The father reminded the son that it was “awesome” that he cared so much about the Bills, but dwelling on the loss was a waste of time. Instead, he said, “Let’s just try to take the positives from this year. We had great experiences watching it with family and friends. You just have to think about that and think about how the Bills will build on this for next year.”

Amanda MacBlane fears that she’s passed on to her two sons, Sam and Jonah, her own dread that the Bills will always find a way to lose. She told me that when Bills fans have babies, it’s common for parents to send out photos of their newborns crying while wearing a Bills onesie. The caption reads, “Ready for a lifetime of disappointment?”

But when she thinks about growing up with those early 1990s teams, it no longer bothers her that they didn’t win a Super Bowl. “Some of my happiest memories of us as a family were around the Bills,” she said.

She added, “I still love that ‘90s team, I don’t care that they didn’t win a Super Bowl. And I would say that I feel the same way about this current team. I just feel fortunate to get to watch them play.”

That may be the best lesson of all.

Kia Miakka Natisse contributed reporting.