Having grown up in Buffalo, NY in the early 1990s, it's impossible to forget the city's golden age of sports. The glory of four straight AFC championships for the Buffalo Bills was overshadowed by four Super Bowl losses, and it all happened when I was an impressionable kid. Now that I've been a Massachusetts resident for the last ten years, it's easy for me to sympathize with New England Revolution fans.
The Revs made it to the MLS championship match four times in six years, losing each time. They lost two consecutive shots at the Cup to the Houston Dynamo in 2006 and '07. Back in the early '90s, the Bills lost their last two Super Bowl appearances to another Texas-based franchise, the Dallas Cowboys.
The flip-side is that the Revs beat FC Dallas (we Bills fans have a thing against Texas teams) at the Lamar Hunt Cup final a month before their loss to the Dynamo in '07. New Englanders had the pleasure of seeing Houston fall to the Revs in the season opener and at SuperLiga the following year, while Buffalo fans never really got revenge for that last Super Bowl loss.
I know, fans of soccer and fans of American football can seem like they're worlds apart. It was impossible to escape the football fandom in Buffalo in the early '90s. Indeed, the level of passion among Buffalonians in those days was labeled by "fandemonium" by a famous local sports announcer. Though the Revs' first Cup appearance saw record-setting hometown crowds at Gillette Stadium (the 60,000-plus attendance has yet to be matched in the MLS), the team is nowhere near as popular as other New England franchises.
Nevertheless, Revs fans are a dedicated, close-knit group. They're as passionate about the sport and their team as my fellow Buffalonians were back in the early '90s. Maybe it was that level of devotion, that love of the game, that special sense of community that turned me on to MLS in the first place. Once I became a New Englander, I found kindred soccer fans who had a familiar sense of identity in the sports world.
If anything's shown just what Revs fans are made of, it's been the last two seasons. I'll readily admit to joining their ranks during the excitement of the 2002 season, but I like to think I'm more than a bandwagon fan. I've stuck it out through the Buffalo deja-vu of four lost MLS Cup finals and the highs and lows that followed. With the Revs failing to make the playoffs in 2010, I think I can safely say that fans are coming off of a low.
Disappointment aside, I wouldn't dare call the Revolution "snake-bitten." I heard that term thrown around too much in Buffalo. Besides, despite a lot of familiar feelings, this former Buffalonian knows that the Revs are most definitely not the Buffalo Bills. This is a trophy-winning MLS franchise with its share of real victories in recent years. The Bills have become a lost cause, the Revs still have the potential to win.
While the 2009 and 2010 seasons were as disappointing as I've seen, 2011 is a chance for redemption. Despite ending a promising pre-season with a 3-1 defeat to arch-enemy Houston, the team has offered up glimmers of hope. A win over the Galaxy at the March 20 season opener could mean a good year in store for Revs fans, including this Buffalo sports refugee.
