Article from Tim Avery- @TheTimAvery on Instagram
If you’re wondering who or what Janus is, look it up.
If you’re wondering what happened on Thursday, September 7th, two thousand twenty-three, the scoreboard doesn’t lie: The Undoubtable was doubted. In fact, it was derailed, denied, and its knee-caps were de-Campbelled, folks.
20 - 0 in 2022 is now nothing more than a KC pipe-dream with a fork buried Lion’s-mane deep in it.
But wait, kids... this loss comes with a caveat. You see, even before the Detroit Lions trotted, victoriously, back into Arrowhead’s visitors’ locker room, following their thrilling 21-20 big-dub over the face Chris Collingsworth pleasures himself to each night and his team of rap-sheet collectors, the capital-N “Narrators” of the Not Fansofthebills League had already begun curving the arc of history towards their inclinations.
As the Chiefs were busy chalking an “L” on their schedule, despite Nick Wrong’s prognostications, The Narrators were busy-beeing away, twiddling their former-Twitter fingers, babbling their Bills-hating blowhards harder than Buffalo snowblowers blow snow, and doing everything in their power to rewrite the nascent 2023 season’s script.
In short: The asterisks were reproducing like rabbits, precipitated by Mike “Company Man” Tirico. You don’t need to take my word for it, though; I’ve scrounged Two Bills Drive, for a morsel of Tiricoian, capital-N Narrative back-peddling. Poster, “Billznut”, caught one of the Narrator’s quips, and crystallized it in this post:
After a brief chew on that cud, let us take a Janus-esque peek back at the Narrative surrounding the sobering conclusion to the 2022 Buffalo Bills season. Again, I’ll leave the sentiment to the Two Bills Drive message boards, where “Beast” commented:
“Beast” makes an excellent point: When looking forward, and peering back, Beast’s point leads to a logical inquiry: Where were the asterisks for our beloved Buffalo Bills, in 2022? Where was Hyde’s n**k injury? I tried looking beneath Tirico’s flimsy yes-man facade for the T**PS shooting asterisk. I tilted a Maglite up the colossal cavern of Nick Wrong’s schnoz, peering around goobers for Damar H****n. I even knocked on Blowhard Coward’s door, asking for clarity about Kim P****a’s health status... Everywhere I checked, though, I spotted neither hide nor hair of a*******s pertaining to the Buffalo Bills 2022 season.
Looking back to “Beast’s” post, the author encapsulated the capital-N Narrative, adroitly:
“No, those were just losses. As they should be.” (emphasis added)
In football–In THE game of inches and chance, THE game of coin-flips and 13 seconds, THE game of impossible losses and skylines dotted with the rust-belt hulks of logic-breaking heartbreaks–In THE game of football, can we honestly appeal to logic?
Can there be “should be’s”, if we look critically at football?
The answer should–there goes that pesky logic, again–be a simple: “No”; however, ****. Or, in another turn of the phrase, The Pat*****ts–wherein, in Buffalo Bills message board lore, the number of asterisks denotes the number of times the New England Patriots have cheated and gotten away with it.
TL/DR is an interesting tool, and one that applies to our little chat; TL/DR looks only forward. You can’t anagram the name “Janus” out of “TL/DR”.
Ya follow?
Sorry... That was a terrible pun... I’m back on track: The point being, the capital-N Narrators (i.e. The Collinsworths and Tiricos, the Skip Takelessess and Nick Wrongs of the world) push a narrative that is decidedly un-Janus-esque: They ONLY want us to be looking forward. They make excuses when their story unravels, dropping asterisks like bread-crumbs, leading us all forward like little Hansels and Gretels, discouraging us from ever looking back.
Buffalo is a cold, snowy city. We relish in January: Namesake of the Greek God Janus.
Mafia: In order to shovel our collective way out of the capital-N Narratives burying us like a 7-foot Orchard Park blizzard, we need to embrace who we are: Fans who can see both forward and back. We need to understand and undermine the capital-N Narratives holding us back. We need to see the national football media for what it is: A narrative-driven league that has always tried to write us out of the last page. You don’t need to ask me, though; just ask The Cigarette Smoking Man...
We need to learn how to look forward, tune out all the hot-take garbage, and Billeve!
And on Monday night, let’s go out there and crush their Rogers fairytale. Let’s Fahrenheit 451 their books. Let’s make Collinsworth wince, Tirico tear up, Nick Wrong stop posting anything ever... Let’s show the world that there is only one team in New York State.
GO BILLS!
-Tim Avery - 9/10/2023
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