Playing the lottery

If you live in Buffalo right now and you haven't started searching earnestly between your sofa cushions for old lottery tickets, what on earth is stopping you?

The Buffalo Bills are 3-0.

On a gorgeous September Sunday, they beat the visiting New England "Greatriots" 34-31 on a 28-yard field goal with three seconds left on the clock by Rian Lindell, who saw his ball go just right, splitting the uprights and sending an adrenaline shot through all of Western New York and its considerable diaspora.

Stadium security, quite wisely, guarded the goal posts lest they come down in the post-game celebrations.

Did we mention the Buffalo Sabres are the highest paid team in the NHL? That new owner, Terry Pegula is an oil-and-gas billionaire who has decided spilling hundreds of millions to build a winning hockey team is a great idea?

"The sole purpose for the existence of the Buffalo Sabres is to win the Stanley Cup, he said when he bought them, and has spent like he's been trying to prove a point ever since.

Christian Erhoff, come on down, we have a 10-year, $40-million contract just for you.

The early returns look promising as the Sabres, with their fancy new dressing room and their club-owned AHL team down the road in Rochester are a perfect 4-0 in exhibition play.

But that's for October and beyond.

What's happening right now with the Bills is the stuff of fantasy football - and we're talking grown men contemplating sawing off appendages to see the impossible come true type fantasies, not a bunch of buddies getting together to argue about the merits of drafting Philip Rivers over Drew Brees.

The Bills were already a pretty cute NFL story. They opened up with a 41-7 win on the road against Kansas City, a win that was fun but lost a little bit of luster when it became apparent that the Cheifs were the NFL's equivalent of a Joe Louis - a sugary creamy confection that you eat quickly but offering little in the way of sustainable benefit.

The Bills did build on it though, with their crazy come-from-behind win at home over the Oakland Raiders. Again, it was nice to be 2-0, but this was an Oakland team that had played Monday night and flown across the country, and that the Bills were life-and-death to win against.

The party would be over, sane brains were predicting, sometime Sunday afternoon with Tom Brady and the Patriots squishing Bills fan's misplaced optimism the way windshields do bugs.

And at about ten minutes after 1 p.m., all was unfolding as expected as Brady completed a string of passes like he might if he was playing catch before finding a wide-open Wes Welker, who found his way into the endzone untouched to put New England up by a touchdown after their first possession.

By the middle of the second quarter the route was on, with Buffalo falling behind 21-0. And if you found it surprising that two of the touchdowns were scored by Rob Gronkowski, the Patriots tight end and a Western New Yorker by birth, well, the name Scott Norwood probably doesn't ring a bell either.

But Chan Gailey's Bills are proving themselves a different breed. Led by their own intelligent, quick-decision making quarterback, Harvard-educated Ryan Fitzpatrick, they didn't roll over.

A quick-strike touchdown engineered by Fitzpatrick and a field goal made possible by a Brady interception just before halftime cut the lead to a more manageble 21-10.

At this point this may have seemed like a win in itself for Bills fans. No one was reasonably expecting Buffalo to win on Sunday; oddsmakers had them as 9-point underdogs at home. Just avoiding a confidence-sapping blowout seemed like a good goal.

The last time Buffalo had beaten their dominant division rival was opening day of the 2003 season. The 15 straight losses to the Patriots marked the third-longest losing streak in the NFL.

And it wasn't one of those statistical quirks. The Patriots, since 2003 (and longer, really), have been the NFL's best team.

Coming into Sunday's game they were 102-26 since they last lost to the Bills, back when George Bush was just wrapping up his first term as President. The Bills were 52-76 over the same stretch and coming off their sixth straight losing season. They haven't been in the playoffs since 1999.

The chances of the Bills coming all the way back again (they trailed 21-3 against Oakland) were, you know, somewhere between slim and in need of hallucinogens.

I mean, what's next, Tom Brady throwing four interceptions?

Not to belabour the point, but Tom Brady did throw four interceptions. The game-winning field goal didn't go wide right or anywhere else but straight down the pipe.

Meanwhile the Sabres announced on Saturday they were waiving $5-million of NHL salaries so they can get under the NHL salary cap.

Buy that lottery Buffalo, in fact, buy two.

Michael Grange will provide insight and analysis on all the top stories in sports.