Here They Come Again

Maybe that's it: One way or another, since New Year's, the Bills have arrived alive. Pretty, ugly, scary, gritty. Doesn't matter. When you think about it, perhaps the best comeback of all has been by the team itself. For the first time in the 1990s, the Bills had to do it the hard way. Levy kept reminding them. He held up a Buffalo News headline that ran before the remarkable victory over Houston. It read, BILLS BEGIN LONGEST ROAD TODAY. Have your worst season in five years? Get behind the Oilers 35-3 and still win? Go to Pittsburgh and beat a team coming off a week off? Go to Florida, land of the Legend, and spoil Shula's dream to become the only man to coach in a Super Bowl in the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s? No problem.

The Bills made Fin soup of it all: the fans, the plans, the man. For two weeks they had been carried by their subs—Reich for Kelly, Davis for Thomas, squadrons for Smith—but now their stars were back. They had earned back their Mercedes keys.

So go ahead. Make all the fun you want. Call the AFC championship the junior varsity game. Stand there in Dallas and ask who won the consolation game. The AFC deserves the flak. It has lost eight Super Bowls in a row. Hell, the Bills deserve it. They've lost the last two. For some reason, though, this Buffalo team just seems different from the previous two. It seems to have a sticky kind of resolve, a discount destiny that just won't let these Bills give in.

Back inside the locker room, one Buffalo player remained—Hull, the center—and he looked as if he'd just crawled out of a jackknifed semi. He was in his third minute of trying to get his suit coat on. He'd been playing football since August and had two weeks to go and was so exhausted that merely getting dressed was a chore. Still, as the last man in the locker room, he had to endure the last question.

Hey, Kent, do you guys plan on doing anything differently this Super Bowl?

"Yeah," said Hull with one final wince. "Win."