Buffalo’s loss is Josh Allen’s latest brutal loss to Patrick Mahomes.

There is not much left to say. Each issue is assigned one story headlined “God Just Hates the Buffalo Bills,” and we used ours last year. We’ve already established on these pages a few times that the modern NFL has one basic truth: Most teams don’t have Patrick Mahomes, but one team does, and that team will never be out of the rest of our hair. No narrative analysis of what it all means that the Kansas City Chiefs have gotten another over on the Bills will add much that is new.

In fact, the Chiefs have Mahomes, and a lot can go wrong in a small sample size sport for all the teams that don’t have him. That’s pretty much it. Was Kansas City’s 32–29 victory over Buffalo in Sunday’s AFC Championship the most demoralizing yet of this four-game playoff run painfully sandwiched between four straight regular-season wins in the series? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether stacking more of these on the deck hurts more or gives way to numbness at some point.

It’s tempting and wrong to declare at one point that Josh Allen will never beat Mahomes. Perhaps the biggest atrocity Sunday night against Bills fans. The fact is, the Bills had every chance to beat the Chiefs tonight, and they will have every opportunity in future meetings. The fact is, this thing can still happen, which stinks because Bills fans can’t know the sweet release of giving up. They will have to hang around if Mahomes backs off or the variance finally breaks in their favor. Maybe it will. Maybe not.

“They all come down to the wire,” Mahomes told Jim Nantz from the champions’ podium after the game. “Fortunately, we were on the winning side this time.” The beat when Mahomes said “this time” without bursting into laughter was the moment that, if I were a Bills fan, would have caused me psychological damage. The Bills are professional football’s stock image of playoff near misses, the franchise that lost four straight Super Bowls 31 years ago and is plausibly credited with deepening the misery of a superfan named Timothy McVeigh. It’s now worth asking the somehow reasonable question of whether Mahomes’ playoff dominance of Allen’s team constitutes at least the same level of fan torture.

At least three of the four playoff losses the Bills have taken at the hands of KC since 2020 have a fair case as being the worst knife to the heart. After a perfectly ordinary two-touchdown loss in the ’20 COVID season AFC Championship Game, the Bills have found themselves in increasingly painful circumstances. Their 42–36 overtime loss in the divisional round of the 2021 season stands as one of the best games in football history, the kind of game that gets its own Wikipedia page. Last season’s loss was arguably worse because the Bills were playing at home, hoping to flip the script as the top seed. This season’s defeat draws its agonizing force from being the latest in such a long line, and from where it went wrong.

Each entry in this anthology of loss has a long list of debatable turning points that could make it “the worst.” A compelling one in this game was a fourth down-and-1 for the Bills with 13 minutes left at the Chiefs’ 41-yard line. Allen is the size of a moose, but he had been stopped most of the night on short runs where the Chiefs (and future Hall of Fame tackle Chris Jones) were wise to Allen’s preference to run to the left of the QB keepers. Allen had failed on his first three attempts in those situations, but he had just converted one a few plays earlier. The Bills led by one point and in all likelihood would have extended that lead with another first down. Allen got it, video replay made it clear, but the camera angle didn’t make it clear enough to topple a difficult short space on the field. The Chiefs went the other way and got 8 points off their possession.

Allen had more heroics in him, though, and he led a game-tying touchdown drive after that. He threw a fourth-down touchdown pass to Curtis Samuel on the ensuing drive to tie the game. After Mahomes led a field goal drive to take the lead with three minutes left, Allen continued to hang in there. On another fourth down, the Bills chose not to protect Allen with a tight end or a running back, calling a play out of an empty formation. The Chiefs sent the house and Allen had no chance — until he created one with a stunning heave to a great-open Dalton Kincaid. The tight end dropped the ball as he got back to it near the edge of the field goal area. Mahomes and Andy Reid then toyed with the Bills some more to ice the game and close it out a smart delivery for the apartment for a clinching first down.

Here’s where it really stinks: The Chiefs didn’t even have the benefit of much Chiefsiness in this game. When you watched, it didn’t feel just as the football gods had ordained another triumph in Kansas City.

Allen was Mahomes’ equal, as he so often has been in his playoff losses. Travis Kelce has wrecked the Bills a few times, but Buffalo held him to two catches for 19 yards. (The very slow vet contributed more than that as a decoy and route runner, but still: 19 yards.) The Bills fumbled four times, but recovered each one, while the one time the Chiefs put the ball on the ground, the Bills came up with the. After key cornerback Christian Benford went out with an early injury, the Bills still scrapped and beat nicely on defense, limiting the Chiefs’ passing game to two big JuJu Smith-Schuster catch-and-runs and 85 yards on seven carries for the absurdly quick. rookie, Xavier Worthy. There was a long field goal attempt in this game and it was the Bills’ Tyler Bass who drilled one from 53 yards.

But the margins have always, always sweated the bills in one way or another. They missed a pair of 2-point conversions, one of them after a penalty on the Chiefs caused them to give up a kick and try for the extra point from a yard closer. The fourth-down call went against them, not because the fix is ​​in for the Chiefs (a weird theory, frankly), but because the NFL insists that an on-field call can only be overturned if a jury of the players’ peers deliberates hours and rules then a verdict of “bad place”. Worthy turned a certain Bills interception into a ridiculous catch that led to a Chiefs touchdown.

I imagine it’s one thing to lose a couple of times to the same opponent because Mahomes and Kelce do what they always do. I imagine losing to one is much worse fourth time to the same opponent, even on a night when Mahomes isn’t a full weapon, Kelce doesn’t do much and all five fumbles in the game break in your direction. The Bills-Chiefs series has become the biggest thing the NFL has, a special football product that doesn’t even require the artificial sparkle pumped into the Super Bowl itself. There’s a real case that, for many fans, the Bills-Chiefs are now the true meat and potatoes of this league. Several generations of today’s Bills fans weren’t alive to feel what it was like the last time their team had an unprecedented multi-year run of elite play and late postseason futility. At least they have now felt closer replica.