Illustration by Tim Walker

Orchard Park, New York -- It's hard to balance the happiness with the embarrassment -- almost as hard as it is to figure out how the idiots always manage to end up in the back.

In certain situations, like on the bus, there's a degree of sense, of natural order, to it. When you load 60 people on a 60-passenger bus, someone's going to end up sitting back near the can; the fact that the very guys who will spend the trip drinking heavily, farting with juvenile pride, and loudly (and continually) asserting their homophobia and misogyny almost invariably end up sitting in the rear only seems right. (Sure, they're only trying to hide, engaging in behavior learned on school field trips to places they can't remember, but I can at least allow myself to pretend their seating choice reveals that at some elemental level they truly understand themselves.)

In other situations, like in Ralph Wilson Stadium, it's harder to explain. It's difficult to believe the Buffalo Bills box office somehow managed to identify potential idiots from afar and handily assigned them to an area that resembles their natural habitat. But perhaps in some circumstances the Bills ticketers do have that power. Maybe they were tipped off by the very fact that most of the Pats fans sitting in the section Don and I are in (332, all the way at the top of the stadium) arrived on bus tours. I haven't been on one of these tours before -- the ones offered by sports travel agencies, where you buy tickets, accommodations, and transportation as a package. For all I know, these things may simply attract a particular breed.

So it could be that the stadium knew where to put us just because they knew how we were getting our tickets. Or it could just be that these are the sections where block ticket buys are available, and that the rest is purely coincidental. Either way, it's worked out as usual. We're at the back of the stands. And a lot of the Pats fans sitting around us are . . . well, they're kind of assholes.

There are the two guys sitting directly to my left, for example, guys who came in on the same bus we did (and sat in the back). They were drunk coming into the stadium, and they've been growing steadily more inebriated through the game. One's approaching comatose (he was merely stupefied when he and his buddy arrived shortly after kickoff). He stares at midfield, reacting to almost nothing that happens in the game. He snaps to every once in a long while to attempt another sip of his beer, invariably dumping more on my leg ("Oh, uh, sorry") than he gets in his mouth. The other has been staggering along the line between obnoxious and belligerent. He wears a ragged goatee that seems made for mug shots and sports a chipped front tooth that I'd lay solid odds reveals a history of bar fights. He's been booking for a fight with the Bills fans seated behind us since the Pats scored their first touchdown, turning to taunt them (sloppily) at every opportunity, and adopting a "Who, me?" attitude -- shrugging, palms raised -- when someone shouts at him to sit his ass back down.

Those two are easy to write off, though. They're a couple of standard-issue yahoos making asses of themselves because they can't come up with anything more interesting to do with their time.

And Don and I have disassociated ourselves from them, taking advantage of their second-quarter trip to the beer stands to let the increasingly annoyed Bills fans nearby know these jackasses are not actually with us. We've even attempted to convince the home crowd that we're more typical of Pats fans than the drunks.

It's not really the fact that they're drunk that has us distancing ourselves. It's that they don't understand what would seem to be a simple rule for watching your team win on someone else's field: you have to know the difference between celebrating and taunting. Don and I do know it. The more lively drunk, at least, either doesn't know or doesn't care.

And unfortunately for all of us, neither does the giant group of Pats fans at the very back of the section (the very back of the stadium). It's late in the game and the Pats are up 38-7. There's no question about the way the game is going to end. In fact, most Bills fans are headed for the gates. The Pats fans who now own the stadium -- there are thousands and thousands who have made the trip out to the shores of Lake Erie -- have broken into the chorus from "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye." That part's fine. It isn't exactly imaginative, but it's fine. It's a football game, after all. And it's the first time Pats fans have seen a win since September 22.

But then the song ends before the gang in the back has had enough -- so they try something else. "P-A-T-S, Pats, Pats, Pats!" they chant. I turn to Don, and he's got the same pained expression on his face as I do.

"Oh, God," I say. "They didn't really do that, right?"

Don doesn't have a chance to respond before they do it again.

It's not simply that they've adapted the Jets cheer. Under the right circumstances (specifically, a rout of the Jets in front of their famously obnoxious fans) that would be okay, even funny. But these aren't the right circumstances. What's happening here is that a bunch of rowdies whose distinctly unproven team has been good enough and lucky enough to beat a strong division rival have gotten their chests puffed out and their heads swollen. And now they're berating the home team and its fans, who have been nothing but perfectly gracious hosts. In short, they're not just sounding like Jets fans, they're behaving like Jets fans. For the few moments it's happening, it's enough to spoil what's otherwise been an enjoyable afternoon in Orchard Park.

Then the other chant, the one that started in the end zone, a lilting taunt of "Blehhhhhd-soooooe, Blehhhhhd-soooooe, Blehhhhhd-soooooe" (the former Pats quarterback has had a decidedly difficult afternoon) works its way around and, while it's ugly (Drew Bledsoe has never done anything to earn Pats fans' derision), it's expected. It's part of the experience. I'm pretty sure Bledsoe can handle it. Plus, it makes the Jets thing go away.

A minute later, though, that P-A-T-S taunt re-emerges. And while I'm determined to see this game to the very end, I start glancing around at the exits. I'm glad the Bills fans nearest us have left already.

THE HAPPINESS takes over again as soon as we get some distance from section 332. As we walk across the street, even as we search endlessly for our bus among a sea of others, what's most on my mind is the Patriots' win.

The Pats have won a game they couldn't afford to lose if they're to have any chance of turning this season around. They've beaten a team they had to beat if they hope to contend for the AFC East title. They've evened up their record with a big win on the road. And they've done it all by playing good, solid football, looking like the team that went 3-0 to start the season rather than the one that went 0-4 thereafter. That they ran all over a team with a suspect defense isn't impressive all by itself. That they stopped a team with a powerhouse offense is.

It'll take a win next week at Chicago (probably much more) before I'm ready to start even thinking of truly believing in the Pats again, but 38-7 is at least enough to make me feel glad to have taken the trip.

The tour itself has been mostly good, too. The Stoneham-based agency running it has done a good job, getting us to Buffalo in decent time, putting us up in a good hotel, throwing a perfectly respectable tailgate party before the game. In all, this company has brought nearly a thousand Pats fans to Buffalo for the weekend. And most of the people at the tailgate party seemed pretty content.

Don and I were among a good-size group who caught our bus (one of 17) in Auburn, leaving at about 7 a.m. Saturday. With a stop in Chicopee to pick up another group (including most of the back-of-the-bus brigade) and two rest stops, we were in Buffalo by 2:30 p.m., just in time to see BC knock Notre Dame out of the running for college football's championship.

We got a chance to gawk at some of the Patriots players, who stayed in the same hotel we did. We had a few drinks. We met Pats fans in for the game from as far away as DC. It was nothing spectacular, nothing that wouldn't have been thoroughly overshadowed had the Pats taken a nosedive at Wilson Stadium. But in combination with a big Patriots win, it wasn't such a bad way to spend $300.

Except for the assholes. But as we wind our way through a maze of buses, I realize I'm not really all that bothered by them. Not at the moment, anyhow. Not that I've forgotten the jerks at the back of section 332 ("You can't go around acting like Jets fans," I say to Don out of the clear blue at one point), but I know I'll never have to see most of them again, which is comforting.

I haven't forgotten the guys in the back of the bus either. Sitting back listening to the angry Buffalo sports talkers on the bus radio, I try to prepare for them. They'll be worse than they were on the way out. I know that. They'll be drunk. They'll be charged up. They'll be at full power.

And, of course, they are. They enter the bus loudly, drunken smirks on their faces. They settle into their seats with much commotion. And they begin bickering and taunting each other ("Nice pants, you fucking queer," one shouts to another in the course of a debate -- if you can call it that -- over nothing).

I can't hear the radio anymore. Or I can, but only during the short stretches between outbursts. Don, who has one of the late games on his headset radio, is giving me score updates, though, so I've at least got that.

When the bus starts out of the parking lot, Joe, the tour-company guy, sticks some awful Tim Allen movie in the VCR, cranking up the volume just enough so that I can kind of block out the idiocy drifting forward on tufts of flatulence.

I think, 38-7. That's what's important.

It's true, and in those odd moments when the back of the bus actually approaches silence, I can usually get my head around the outcome of the game well enough to keep myself happy.

Sean Glennon is a freelance writer living in Northampton, Massachusetts. He can be reached at sean@thispatsyear.com.

Issue Date: November 8 - 14, 2002