The glimmer of hope at the Bills-Pats game on September 26th. (Photo taken by Kat)

This is what being a Buffalo Bills fan in Boston is like.

It is going to work for sixteen Mondays every year and having your boss throw his hands in the air, sigh heavily and say, “Kat! Those Bills! So close!”

It’s your newest star wide receiver Tweeting his best Nancy Kerrigan impression (StarGames and Jerry Solomon, jump on that like a trampoline and sign him up.)

It’s your mother-in-law asking you for sixteen Sundays every year if your team lost again and asking you why you don’t root for that “Brady fella.”

It’s snagging some hope, however mis-derived, that your Harvard educated quarterback resembles a quarterback more than any since our Doug Flutie experiment of a decade ago. It’s overhearing two Monday morning quarterbacks jump on the commuter rail at Swampscott, joking that while the Bills might be horrible, that Fitzpatrick has the story of the year, given we have such a stereotype of quarterbacks as oggling knocking-up Neanderthals (thanks Brett Favre.) It’s Patriots beat writers and radio hosts trying to find something to talk about on an off Sunday, and asking if Fitzpatrick is the only active quarterback who wears his wedding ring while he plays.

It’s knowing that your owner is on his last legs, and that born-in-relevancy-again Jim Kelly can only pray that he has enough investors to buy the team when the phone eventually rings. It’s knowing that the region you’re from is so economically depressed that it’s not a breach of fandom that caused season tickets holders sell their tickets to Steelers fans, but most likely holiday economic necessity.

It’s knowing that if you ever have children, they probably won’t grow up knowing the Buffalo Bills. That they may be in Toronto or Los Angeles. And for that reason you hang on despite three painfully close overtime losses, despite balls slipping through wide receivers fingers, through waiver pick ups who go straight to the injured reserve, through all of it. Because you know, no matter how much you want to fight it, that it’ll soon be a relic; something to remember, not something to experience.

The Bills don’t just hearken back to a time where they won AFC Championships, but a time before Buffalo and Rochester were victims of the Rust Belt. Back when the blue collar workers of the region had jobs, drove American, could afford season tickets, and loved players seemingly as blue collar as themselves. That’s all gone – my dad and his punch press manning colleagues have the perpetual sense of dread hanging over their heads that today could be the day no more parts need to be made, and don’t have an extra cent to drive out to Orchard Park. Their friends couldn’t renew their season tickets because their jobs left for the sunnier and cheaper climate of Mexico or don’t exist because us Americans only like our Hondas these days.

So I am a Bills fan in Boston, though it would be easy to give into the Brady and Belichick of it all. Because being a Bills fan represents where I am from is and now was. It’s football fandom as a means of keeping relevant a region that, unless it gets 23 inches of snow on December 1st, is no longer relevant to most of this country.

It’s keeping something alive that no one seems to want to root for anymore: the underdog.