The Most Cursed Team in American Sports

The mythical story of the Buffalo Bills could be told like this: Their fans are crazy and live in the snow.

They shovel this snow out of their stadium to help their godforsaken football team, which, until recently, was most famous for losing the Super Bowl four times in a row in the early 1990s.

According to one theory, those failures fed into Timothy McVeigh’s derangement before he planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing.

The franchise was an utter disaster, for the most part, until the 2018 arrival of an otherworldly quarterback named Josh Allen, who has exhibited many heroics.

But he has yet to bring his team to the Super Bowl.

Four of his playoff runs have ended with haunting losses to the quarterback Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.

The others were cut short in unromantic fashion—­most recently by one of the sloppier performances of Allen’s career, against the Denver Broncos.

From the outside, you might ask: “Can he really do it?” But in Buffalo, the words Josh Allen come out like “Good morning.” On a Sunday afternoon in September, I sat down in an ancient tavern near the Buffalo River to eat chicken wings and watch the Bills’ division rivals, the New England Patriots, play the Pittsburgh Steelers.

An older man joined me and asked, unprompted, if I liked Josh Allen.

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

He revealed that he was wearing a Josh Allen shirt under his sweater, said that he would get another one for me out of his car, and then did.

Josh Allen is everywhere in Buffalo.

He appears in murals and on billboards; road signs are doctored to feature his name and face.

At the grocery store, you can buy Josh Allen Crunch Time cereal and cantaloupes grown on the Allen family’s farm, in Firebaugh, California.